Body Awareness: starts off numb
What country, friends, is this? For about the first three-quarters of Body Awareness, I had no idea where I was. I mean, I knew the literal location. In Annie Baker’s script, a couple named Joyce and Phyllis, are living with Joyce’s 21-year-old son Jared in a Vermont...
The Birds & the Bees: A play about U-turns takes one of its own
Sometimes I think that theatre companies should offer half-price tickets to people who only want to watch Act 2. Act 1 of The Birds & the Bees is a waste of time. Admittedly, it sets up the story. Thirty-eight-year-old Sarah’s 11-year marriage has just broken up —...
Luzia: Just say yes to this sensual extravaganza
Luzia is by far the most sensual Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen. Go with your body wide awake. Go with somebody you can grab onto when you’re screaming and lean into when you’re swooning. Most Cirque shows are set in magical realms, but that’s only partly true of...
What We’re Up Against: the politics outweighs the art
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...
Herringbone: great premise T-boned by a weak story
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...
Hysteria: important ideas in search of a theatrical focus
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:...
Après le Déluge: It’s raining (mostly) excellent jokes
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...
A Thousand Splendid Suns could easily lose 250 of them
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...
Mother of the Maid: a theatrical strategy that doesn’t work
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...
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