by Colin Thomas | Apr 1, 2023 | Review
I’m white and urban writing about playwright Shayna Jones’s exploration of being Black and rural. Keep that in mind as you read this. In her solo show Black & Rural, which she has written and is now performing, Jones tells us that she lives in a mountain village...
by Colin Thomas | Dec 5, 2022 | Review
You have to be smart to be dumb. Or wily. Or at least have good instincts. Okay, I don’t really know how they do it, but, playing a couple of goofballs in Pacific Theatre’s production of The Messiah, Peter Carlone and John Voth are very funny and very engaging. For...
by Colin Thomas | Oct 1, 2022 | Review
On my trip to Benevolence, I started on a hill, then wandered through a valley. As I climbed the rise on the other side, I was surprised to find a startling view. Translation: I got bored in the middle of this show, but there’s such an excellent payoff that my...
by Colin Thomas | May 30, 2022 | Review
For me, the doorway to this production didn’t open until about halfway through. At that point, it became transcendent — intermittently. By the end, I was moved. In Katori Hall’s 2009 script, she imagines Martin Luther King Jr. in his motel room on April 3, 1968, the...
by Colin Thomas | Mar 27, 2022 | Review
It’s kind of like a horror movie with an obvious out — like “Why don’t they just call the cops?” In her 2011 script How the World Began, Catherine Trieschmann sets up an artificial conflict between the scientific and the religious. Susan has recently arrived in...
