Sex With Strangers: not as much fun as it sounds
Sex With Strangers is boring. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.) In Laura Eason’s drama, 39-year-old Olivia is holed up in a writers’ retreat/B & B in Michigan when 28-year-old Ethan bursts out of the snow and through the door. Olivia is a...
The Ones We Leave Behind: Leave this one behind
This script landed on the stage before it was ready. It’s in terrible shape. In The Ones We Leave Behind, playwright Loretta Seto explores abandonment and belonging. On one of her first cases as a public trustee, Abby has to find anybody who might be related to...
Sweat: don’t sweat it
It takes too long for the plot to hit the fan. Playwright Lynn Nottage has set Sweat in a working-class bar in Reading, Pennsylvania. A local steel-manufacturing plant defines the lives of everybody associated with the place. The central trio of women—Cynthia, Tracey,...
The Wolves: they shoot, they score, they stupefy
This is a guest review by David Johnston * It begins by throwing the audience to the wolves. We are thrust unceremoniously into a gaggle of chattering teenage girls in identical soccer jerseys. They're stretching for a match, but that's only discernable from context...
Kill Me Now: death-defyingly great
This is a guest review by David Johnston * Kill Me Now is a play that's smart enough to pretend to be the boring version of itself for awhile. That's a rather complicated compliment, so let's break it down. We open with single father Jake Sturdy (Bob Frazer) giving...
Sweeney Todd: a murderous tale to die for
Watching this production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, I felt ridiculously lucky. The show is so strong and its storefront location in Gastown so intimate that I felt like a cast of stars had shown up in my living room to perform a masterpiece....
A Brief History of Human Extinction: barely a whimper
You’d think that a play about the last days of the human race might have some kind of tension, some kind of stakes, but nope, not this one. In A Brief History of Human Extinction, which was created by Jordan Hall and Mind of a Snail (Jessica Gabriel and Chloé Ziner),...
Krapp’s Last Tape: the reel thing
This is a guest review by David Johnston * It's as frustrating as hell. Except that's a feature, not a bug. Honestly, I think most Samuel Beckett scripts, if done right, are going to occasionally frustrate the hell out of audiences. The Irish modernist combines...
Incognito Mode: not stealthy enough
Incognito Mode examines porn—while wearing rubber gloves. Amazingly, given the subject, there isn’t a millisecond of eroticism and there’s no real immersion in shame. This might be a dangerous thing to say of a show about porn, but I wanted it to go deeper. To create...
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