pt at large

The History Boys

The History Boys
Play by Alan Bennett
Directed by: Scott Edmiston
Set, Janie E. Howland. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Karen Perlow. Music and sound, Dewey Dellay.
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts, Roberts Studio Theatre, through June 22.
Tickets, $51-54, 617-933-8600, bostontheatrescene.com

We’re living in a roiling sea of interests competing for our time and allegiance. What will help us get on in life, a deep understanding of our cultural history or the ability to reduce it to superficial sound bytes?

The question is posed, and not necessarily answered, by a rambunctious and touching SpeakEasy Stage production of ‘The History Boys,’ recently extended till June 22, at the Roberts Studio Theater in the Calderwood Pavilion.

The story unfolds in a working class boys’ school in 1984 Sheffield England. An eccentric professor, Hector, played by Bob Colonna, is a gray-bearded Socrates in a tweed jacket. "All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use," he says. The scenes of him careening between poetry, popular song, and exuberant skits to tease out lessons in history and culture to his class of eight students are filled with intelligence and a jaunty Python-esque imagination.

Tom Irwin, a young professor, is hired by the fatuous headmaster to improve the boys’ chances of being accepted at famed Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Irwin, played by Chris Thorn, encourages the boys to build their college entrance exams with froth and the reason of a sophist. They’ve been taught to write with a stone mason’s skill, laying foundation and layering point after point, “Booooring”, says Irwin.

"History nowadays is not a matter of conviction," he says. "It’s a performance." He encourages them to find the Fox News versions of their essays and abandon their training to search for historical perspective.

The eight boys are the stuff of the melting pot that is working class England. The dialogue between them underscores their wavering loyalties as they decide which of their teachers represents their best way to succeed. Dan Whelton as alpha male Dakin and Karl Baker Olson as sensitive gay student Posner are standouts. Olson’s singing of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and recitation of Thomas Hardy’s "Drummer Hodge” are unabashed expressions of unrequited love for another student.

Bennett’s main characters are complex and flawed. Hector’s habit of groping the boys he takes on motorcycle rides is certainly inappropriate. To his students, his behavior is a joke but there are consequences. Irwin misrepresents his credentials. Let’s just say the ending is not tidy.

Director Scott Edmiston and sound designer Dewey Dellay pull out the stops and use music, singing and lively dance routines that look choreographed for jolly soccer players as transitions between scenes.

History has not been crowded out of prime time in the British public education system, at least not in the 1984 England we see here. When is the last time your play program included two pages filled with over two dozen literary, historical, and pop culture references that will appear in the play? When is the last time you heard the names of Gracie Fields and Piero della Francesca (via T.S. Eliot) bandied about in any kind of play? No matter which way these boys write their exams, Hector’s made sure they know their history.

And I’ll bet my laptop that several references to the Dissolution of Monasteries, the destruction of 800 monastic libraries in the mid-1500s that represented a cultural and educational loss, is an echo of what playwright Alan Bennett wonders about in today’s era in which ‘history’ seems to mean last week.

We’re living in a sea of change. So many of our traditions, ways of thinking and living are becoming artifacts of history, replaced by fresh ideas, concepts, and market forces. But is newer better? The History Boys aren’t the only ones who have to decide. We have to do it every day.

Eddie Izzard

Eddie Izzard began his American tour, “Stripped”, at Boston's Orpheum Theater, April 28 - 30, 2008
Orpheum Theater
1 Hamilton Place, Boston, MA 02108

Intelligent, rakish humor that doesn’t rely on bodily functions, bathroom activities, or saturated sexual innuendo is hard to come by in America. Which is exactly why an Eddie Izzard show is so refreshing. When he walks onto the stage and gets around to saying. “Tonight, we’re going to talk about… EVERYTHING!” he means it. All 4 billion years of the earth's history.

The next two hours were spent with Izzard cobbling together an oddball pastiche of comedy, history, and general clowning around. Wrap culture, language, and religion in tinfoil, set it in the microwave, and you have an Eddie Izzard show.

Watch Izzard mime about God using a crème brulee torch to create the earth or boil down the Ten Commandments to its essentials. Marvel at his downright courage to say. “Y’know, all we need is one commandment: Be kind to one another.” There is slight pause while he makes sure you registered that. Then a sharp left turn in which he acts out Moses trying to hold back the sea, or dinosaurs with little hands singing from hymnals in church, or Darwin's theory of evolution - "Monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey, you!"

Eddie Izzard is an updated Monty Python, crossed with Steve Martin and Richard Pryor. The English actor has a general idea of what he’s driving at but is so busy looking out the window that he gets gloriously lost amongst the trees along the way. A conversation about the existence of God might be interrupted by whipping out his iPhone to look up the definition of soup - which might been on the menu of the Jesus's Last Supper, “It’s all here on Wikipedia, you know.” And we do.

Using part of that detour as a running joke for the rest of the night, he gets a nearly Pavlovian response of laughter when he’ll pause and utter, “Soup!”

This is the first stop of his three-month American tour of  “Stripped”. By the end of the tour he’ll have shaped and somewhat tamed the show into what will become his second HBO special. The first, “Dress to Kill” (in which the cross-dressing comedian sports lipstick and black pumps), put his name on the map in 1999 and won him two Emmy Awards.

Izzard plays dodge ball with the ideas that streak into his brain. His stream of consciousness delivery is a three ring circus in which he is the daring young man on the flying trapeze, the tightrope walker, and one of the clowns squeezing out of the tiny car all at the same time. That’s a nearly death defying trick for a comedian working without a net on new material.

He took dozens of detours on his 4 billion year history tour about Everything. Aside from a few well-timed F words, the show was muscled along on brain cells, not testosterone. You just don’t realize how starved you are for stimulating comedy until you’ve heard this man in concert.

Youtube has bunches of Izzard's stuff from "Dress to Kill"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFq_nk8pE0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k

Whizzin’, a pissa of a show

Whizzin’
Musical by Ryan Landry and Billy Hough
Directed by Ryan Landry and Rick Park
Set, Windsor Newton, Costumes, Scott Martino
Presented by the Gold Dust Ophans
At Machine, through May 24, Tickets $28, 866-811-4111 or theatermania.com
Running time 2 hrs 15 min including fifteen minute intermission

It’s not that often you can see a true-blue campy drag show in Beantown. OK, the black walled basement of Machine on way upper Boylston Street is not exactly the Theater District. And Whizzin’, with book and lyrics by Ryan Landry and Billy Hough, is not a family musical. It’s the raunchy, over the top, un-self-conscious fun that a gay-themed production should be.

When the 6’2” black-clad, tattooed bouncer greeted me at the entrance to Machine last night with a “Hi, Honey,” I knew I wasn’t in Kansas any more.

The plot strays from the original Wizard of Oz but only purists, who are not likely to have this venue bookmarked in their Blackberries, might object. Social satire is often embedded in gay theater productions and Whizzin’ aims its share at cell phone users, Internet pornsters, and botox and plastic surgery addicts. Whizzin’ also refers to Dorothy’s bed-wetting problem.

Several inspired theater effects had the audience roaring with laughter. The imaginative props that cost no more than a collection of tin foil, coat hangers, bits of muslin, and foam rubber were gems. The gray fabric tornado might have cost ten bucks and had the audience in a grand stitch. The costumes were hilariously outlandish.

The theater is nothing more than about a hundred folding metal chairs spread out on a black cement dance floor facing a makeshift stage at one end of the sprawling Machine’s basement. The posters on the bathroom walls leave no doubt as to the proclivities of the patrons.

With impeccable timing, stage presence, and facial expressions, Olive Another’s Glinda delightfully dominated every scene in which she (he?…cripes what’s a reviewer to do about personal pronouns here?) appeared. Most of the other actors had their lines gobbled up when they ran them over audience laughter.

Megan Ludlow’s Dorothy had a fine show girl (and she is a girl) singing voice. Her re-imagined version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow was heartfelt and moving. Ryan Landry as the Wicked Witch squeezed every syllable from his rakish delivery.

As a matter of fact the whole production was full of heart and, dare I say it, gaiety.

Enthusiasm often trumped talent but the acting is so exuberant that it doesn’t seem matter. Like the Lion’s derriere, the production sagged with its own weight from time to time and could use a little kitch-o-suction. But if you want to sit amongst a very mixed crowd and listen to a collection of ballads and bodacious rocker song and dance routines, call the Gold Dust Orphans Company. Their “machine’ is running until May 24th.

Photo courtesy of golddustophans.com

Spin

Spin
A play by Robert J. Sherwood
Directed by David J. Miller
April 18- May 10, 2008
Thursdays, Fridays 8:00 PM
Saturdays 4:00 and 8:00 PM
Sundays 3:00 PM

At the Plaza Black Box Theatre at Boston Center for the Arts
Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont St in Boston’s South End
Tickets: $35
Seniors & Students $30

The first act of Spin feels like shooting Niagara Falls in a barrel. Profane dialogue whooshes by at a dizzying rate, most of it uttered by a gonzo campaign manager who would sell his mother if it would help his candidate win the presidency.

The play opens with Samuel Champlain’s campaign manager gloating over a fifteen-point lead in the polls before the final debate that will occur in two hours. Two minutes later, the adversary’s campaign manager breezes into his office and lights a fuse to a scandal she’s ready to use to derail Champlain’s aspirations.

Boy, do we need a zany play like this. We are numbed by 24/7 politics. He says, she says, she spins, he spins. How much distortion is tacked on to a kernel of truth? Is anything off limits? Does it have anything to do with the candidate’s ability to do a good job?

We get to ponder this as the coyote campaign manager hints that Samuel Champlain’s wife is compromised by something, described as “having to do with three letters, S E X”, that will blow her husband’s candidacy out of the water. The threat: Champlain must accept the VP slot or his wife’s secret is aired and his candidacy is toast. The decision must be made before the debate that occurs two hours later, conveniently the length of the play we’re watching.

While this is teased out, we get to see the kind of wild, numbers driven, information spinning, anything goes politicking that we suspect goes on behind closed doors. Steven Barkhimer plays campaign manager Jerry as a political operative of gleeful crackhead proportions. He speeds along on vats of coffee and has a mind that can reconfigure any fact into a coin of the realm for his boss - a coin that on one side buffs him up and on the other denigrates his opponent. He occasionally overacts but he’s got lines that will make you hoot. (“No promises! Give the impression of promises!” Jerry tells the candidate as he’s practicing for his debate.)

Packaged in this cocktail of a play are a Saturday Night Live spoof and a drama with topical relevance. It’s shaken and stirring. Jerry’s pollster (Melissa Baroni) is a numbers whiz for hire. She can mold a statistic into a roadside bomb or a comforter. The opposing campaign manager (Elisa McDonald) has graduated from the Machiavelli School of Political Warfare. She gives Jerry a sniff of the scandal she’s uncovered and baits him into confronting the candidate’s wife to determine if the ambiguous sex story is true - and how much spin he’ll have to contrive to offset the damage.

The candidate’s wife Alexandra (Christine Power) is as good at spinning her truth as the two campaign managers in the room. These four are playing for all the marbles. Loser is not a word found in any of their lexicons.

Peter Brown inexplicably underplays his role as Henry, the candidate on the cusp of victory. He’s a forty-watt bulb set amongst klieg lights. It would be a serious distraction if the others weren't so busy chomping the daylights out of their roles.

One doesn’t have to be a cynic to see where the production is driving us. In contemporary politics, the notion of truth, decency, character, and moral courage comes home in a flag draped box. We all want to achieve our destinies, our dreams. How much will we sacrifice to realize them?

There are probably some pretty heavy-duty rapscallions who serve us in congress or our communities. Did we elect them because they proved they can do a good job of running the show, or that (short of pedophilia) they are paragons of virtue in their private lives?

It’s two hours of scary fun watching the five characters try to get a grip on shreds of their humanity as the tornado of a political campaign rages around them. It’s even better that the fuse set at the outset of the play is still burning at the end.

Photo courtesy http://www.zeitgeiststage.com/

Three Tall Women: Edward Albee

Edward Albee was raised by a woman who knew a lot about horses and nothing about mothering. His fictional treatment of his early life is the play's undergirding. Questions raised about how we use or revise our memories to fit our identities will resonate with you long after you leave the theater.

Three Tall Women
A Play by Edward Albee
Directed by Spiro Veloudos, Set by Christina Todesco, Costumes by Molly Trainor, Lights by Karen Perlow, Music by Peter Bayne
Lyric Stage  Company through April 26
Tickets, $25-50,617-585-5678
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including one 15 minute intermission

Here are three good reasons to see Three Tall Women: Anne Scurria, Paula Plum, Liz Hayes.

Another reason to see the play is that Edward Albee wrote it. Forget what you’ve heard about the playwright being inaccessible. He poured his heart out (Albee-style) in writing this 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning play in which he fictionalized his upbringing.

The result is a touching, witty charmer that seesaws between broad humor and dark reality. The combination is odd but Albee is a master of making great stuff from unlikely premises.

Albee was raised by a woman who knew a lot about horses and nothing about mothering. By the time he packed his bag, never to return, he left behind a trail of schools he’d been kicked out of and a painful broken relationship with his mother.

To reveal the play’s structure would take the wallop out of seeing it for the first time. One thing that must be revealed is that you don’t have a chance to see three high-velocity actresses play off one another that often.  The women, whom Albee named A, B, and C are played by three powerhouses: Anne Scurria of the Trinity Repertory Theater, Paula Plum, a fixture in Boston drama circles, and up-and-comer Liz Hayes.

Scurria and Plum are fully vested in their roles from the opening scene. The 92 year-old A (Scurria) shoots from the hip, not one PC bone in her aged body. Eighty one year-old Albee writes with the same rifle-bore directness.

As the shadow of death nears, do we re-imagine life’s losses and pleasures as they occurred or as we wished they had occurred?  On occasion, A’s attempts to remember accurately are like watching the proverbial camel fit through the eye of a needle. One wonders how much Albee struggled with the same question as he wrote this loosely autobiographical play.

Paula Plum’s Fifty something B, a cool breeze of mortality just beginning to chill her shoulders, uses her droll wit and deadpan black humor to ready herself for the trials of A, who might represent her own future. Liz Hays as twenty-six year old C is infused with the limitless possibilities of a life unfolding. Hayes, to her credit, inhabits her role more and more deeply as the play develops.

Albee’s preoccupation with the roiling themes of age, memory, relationships, and meaning are packed inside this freight train of a play. From the ABC of it to the XYZ of it, this is the best  production you’re likely to see in Boston this season.

The Shining City

The Shining City
by Conor McPherson
Directed by Robert Falls
BU Theatre - Mainstage, Huntington Avenue, Boston,MA
March 7 - April 6, 2008
Running time 1 hr 30 min, no intermission

Even if a play isn’t totally convincing, a good reason go is to see an outstanding performance by one of its actors.

The chief reason to see The Shining City at the Huntington Theater is John Judd’s performance as the patient of a first year Dublin therapist. Judd’s character John comes to therapist Ian because he’s beset by seeing the ghost of his recently deceased wife.

John’s transformation from bumbling middle class widower into a man who’s faced down his demons is beautifully organic and credible. The downside of this is that there isn’t enough going on elsewhere in the play.

Three of the play’s five scenes show John coming to grips with his complicity in his failed marriage and inhabiting a new and improved psyche in the process. John uses gestures, facial expressions and terrific comic and dramatic timing to tell his story. He’d be an ideal candidate to bend your ear all night long over several jars of Guinness.

The scenes contrast therapist Ian’s slow unraveling as patient John gains traction in reality. Ian, played by Jay Whittaker, is as conflicted a therapist as you’ll find. An ex-priest, he’s just jilted the girlfriend who has borne him a child and is painfully attempting to get a grip on his sexual preference. His struggle is inferred, internal, and nowhere as clearly delineated as that of his patient. Many of his lines are “mmm” and “yes”.  We see him appear distracted as he listens to his patient verbalize. Ian knows he’s bedeviled but hasn’t the nerve to put himself on the couch.

John’s story is the stuff of sitcom entertainment. The more interesting but untold story is about Ian, his renunciation of his vows as a priest, and his struggle with sexual identity.

Judd is comfortable keeping his Irish brogue throughout the play; Jay Whittaker, Nicole Wiesner as his girlfriend, and Keith Gallagher as a hustler waltz in and out of brogue.

Banish a ghost from one person’s life and it re-appears in another’s. The Alfred Hitchcock ending is jarring and not a little “deus ex machina” but without it the play would be dead in the water.

What Ian does with his own ghost is the next chapter in his life. Maybe he needs a good shrink. It’s a shame it isn’t addressed in this play.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater

The Scene

The Scene
Play by Theresa Rebeck
Directed by: Scott Edmiston. Set, Janie E. Howland. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Karen Perlow. Sound, Dewey C. Dellay.
At: Lyric Stage Company, through March 15. Tickets: $25-54. 617-585-5678
Running time 2 hrs plus one 15 min intermission

The Scene is a neo-classic themed play dressed in black high heels. It’s a no holds barred drama, loaded with smart dialogue, plot twists, quick turns, and sharp acting all around. MIddle-aged writer making the scene at high visibility Manhattan party meets younger woman from Ohio. Writer’s career has peaked and he rages with contempt at the vapid NY artsy suck-up scene. Woman is attracted to his volcanic anti-establishment scorn and the fact that he knows people sunning themselves higher on the glitzy entertainment pyramid.

The play is lit up by Georgia Lyman whose portrayal of Clea from Ohio is riveting. Clea is a bimbo savant, mixing her faux Ohio naivety with calculating detachment and an uncanny sense of what makes people around her tick. If they can be useful to her, she will find the chinks in their armor and climb over them.

The brains inside the body that is her portfolio seduce Jeremiah Kissel’s Charlie, the washed up writer. Everyone in the theater knows Charlie is heading for a cliff. Charlie seems to have one last chance at the play’s end. His choice will decide whether he remains a has-been or can swallow enough of his pride to become a somebody again.

Barlow Adamson as Charlie’s best friend and Julie Jirousek as Charlie’s wife Stella are serviceable foils for Charlie and Clea, and fill out themes of friendship and how much bending a marriage can take before it breaks.

Charlie’s affair is used as a catapult to launch stones at the wasteland that is the entertainment industry. No one can succeed without selling off chucks of integrity. Big fish eat little fish. Little fish gulp down enough to become big fish and eat little fish.

The fact that the dialogue has an HBO flair is because writer Theresa Rebeck has written extensively for Law and Order, NYPD Blue and LA Law. She’s also written powerful plays such as Mauritius and View of the Dome.

The set and music are spare and edgy, perfect for the mano a mano dueling going on between characters. The play doesn’t offer new insights on the human condition but does make a helluva scene.

The Clean House

This play showcases one of the best comic scenes you'll ever see . Although the play becomes more reflective in the second act, the incandescent performances of Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll will tickle you long after you leave the theater.

The Clean House
A play in two acts by Sarah Ruhl
Running time 2 hrs, 15 min including one 15 min intermission
New Rep Theater, Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
617-923-8487
February 27 - March 23, 2008

The Clean House ends up in shambles with its inhabitants all the better for it.

The play opens with Lane and her husband Charles (whom we don’t meet until Act 2) hiring a 27 year-old Brazilian to clean their home. Mathilde has a congenital funny bone, hates to clean, and spends her time thinking up the world’s funniest joke. Lane’s sister Virginia appears, wound up tighter than a two-dollar watch, and offers to clean her sister’s house and let Mathilde cogitate comic stories. All on the QT.

The play takes off in the first act with brilliant pairings of Lane the doctor, her sister Virginia, and Lane’s house cleaner Mathilde. Paula Plum overplays Lane with shameless gusto, Nancy E. Carroll underplays Virginia with deadpan wit, and Cristi Miles plays Mathide the Brazilian housekeeper with sunny South American zest. Plum and Carroll cavort with exquisite comic timing, facial expressions, and voice tone. Ten minutes in and you can see that they’ve got it all going on. They know it, you know it and it feeds on itself beautifully. The audience erupted in applause after several interchanges between the two.

Obsessive-compulsive Virginia talks about traveling with her husband to see the ruins in Egypt and can only think, “Why doesn’t someone just sweep those up?” Virginia fills her life by cleaning her apartment religiously.  Her riff about dust is a hoot and you wait for her to feed you more. Mathilde is preoccupied trying to think of the world’s best joke and has no appetite for cleaning. So Virginia offers to clean house for Mathide. The deal Virginia offers the Brazilian maid fits both their needs - Virginia will clean the home of her sister Lane and her doctor husband and Mathilde can try to create the joke that keeps  eluding her.

As Virginia comes to visit in the first act, it is hilariously apparent that Lane and her sister have a  landfill of sibling rivalry. Toward the end of Act 1,Virginia and Mathilde discover a pair of women’s underwear among Charles’ laundry, an item that implodes the solid appearance of Lane and Charles’ marriage.

The second part of the play seems to leave the station on a different train. It’s not so much a question of improbability as tone. Charles, who has fallen in love with one of his cancer patients, comes to the apartment to introduce Ana to his wife (and Virginia and Mathilde who are present). Ana is dying, and Charles has found his soul mate. The humor and more sober aspects of mature love, mortality, along with Charles’s Pollyanna-ish “Cant we all get along together?” attitude can make good theater but the segue was hard to swallow after such a totally comic beginning.

Will Lyman as Charles nails the doctor-as-smitten-lover role. He portrays enough of the remote and practical surgeon in his man who has found his soul-mate role to give us an idea of who he was with Lane and of his struggle to embrace his newfound exuberance. Bobbi Steinbach as Ana is an earthy Mediterranean sunflower beginning to wilt and bend with the weight of her disease. She will not allow herself to drop to the ground before dying and concocts a plan to die on her own terms.

The second half veers close to soap opera from time to time, trying to balance the tears and the laughs and is saved by the terrific ensemble acting and the unorthodox imagination of playwright Sarah Ruhl.

The elegant set designed by Cristina Todesco is as white as an operating room and a terrific foil for the order to chaos back to order arc of the play. Jamie Whoolery’s projections against a backdrop of gridded windows at the apartment’s rear wall ingeniously fill in sights and sounds that connect the scenes.

The first act of this play is as much a tour de force of two actors as you’ll see anytime, anywhere. If there are awards to be given at the end of the year, Paula Plum and Nancy E. Carroll will clean house.

Photo, caption, courtesy of Boston Globe: Cancer-patient Ana (Bobbie Steinbach, left) is involved with a doctor who is married to Lane (Paula Plum, right) in Sarah Ruhl's play. (Andrew Brilliant/Brilliant Pictures)

The Little Dog Laughed, Black Box Theater Boston

The Little Dog Laughed
Play by Douglas Carter Beane
Directed by: Paul Melone. Set, Eric Levenson. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Lights, Jeff Adelberg. Sound, Benjamin Emerson
Presented by: SpeakEasy Stage Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts Wimberly Theatre, through Feb. 16.

Boston has a thriving theater scene, filled with sizzle, substance, and everything in between. The Little Dog Laughed, currently running at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theatre, has the feel of an HBO sizzler. How to achieve happiness and not sell out what’s important to you - or sell it out with minimal collateral damage - is the theme and its actors spend two hours wheedling and diddling to flesh it out.

We’re all familiar with the compromises we make to get by in life, love, and business. Few might have to make more than the closeted film actor, his female lesbian agent, a choirboy male hooker, and his neurotic girlfriend. Seldom do we meet such screwed up people who happen to make us laugh, in spite of their lack of backbone, self-awareness, and personal principles.

Diane, the theater agent, is about to break into the big leagues by pitching a film starring her client Mitchell, the closeted movie star. When Mitchell falls in love with Alex, a young, naïve hooker, and worse, decides to make his homosexuality public, Diane brings in the heavy artillery and takes aim at her client Mitchell, Alex, Alex’s girlfriend Ellen, and the entire Hollywood establishment.

Maureen Keiller grabs the role of the supremely cynical, conniving Diane and wrings it out to dry. With facial expressions, comic timing, and a surgical eye for the soft spots in any human armor in her vicinity, she is formidable, and all the more fierce because she’s acutely aware that she sold her soul to expediency years ago. The wonder of it is that the other three actors aren’t blown away by her phosphorescent turns on the stage.

This is an exquisitely paired quartet of actors who play to and off each other. Robert Serrell’s Mitchell is a disarmingly ingenuous movie star who’s begun to acknowledge the ways he’s allowed his delusions of heterosexuality to suffocate his true inclinations.

Jonathan Orsini’s Alex is damaged goods looking for a soft landing anywhere his heart and trust won’t be battered again.
Angie Jepson plays Ellen, Alex’s comically self-absorbed girlfriend with blithe façade that barely hides the pain of a loveless upbringing.

The play doesn’t brood. It’s a fast-paced satire brimming with one-liners and scalding turns aimed at Hollywood’s shakers and movers, who, in Ellen’s experience, will not acknowledge your existence unless you have a product or a power they need.

Ellen, who has sold out more times than Wal-Mart, proposes a solution to the three lovers. Her shrewd business tactic, asking  “Is everyone happy?” before leaving the negotiation table, results in a denouement that will give you a good reason to reread gaudy Hollywood features in the tabloid press.

Post script: How in the world does the play’s title fit in here, you might be wondering. As the stage lights dim, Ellen recites a nursery rhyme that seems synchronous with her final victory. And playwright Douglas Carter Beane just winked at us and said, “Open your eyes, folks.”

Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

PHOTOS (by Mike Lovett): Robert Serrell as Mitch and Maureen Keiller as Diane; Jonathan Orsini as Alex, Maureen Keiller and Robert Serrell; Angie Jepson as Ellen and Jonathan Orsini

This Wonderful Life: A Christmas-in-a-box one man play

This Wonderful Life
“A delightful solo re-imagining of the Frank Capra classic film”

Lyric Stage
140 Clarendon St.
(YMCA Building, Copley Sq. )
Boston, MA 2117

November 23 - December 22, 2007
Box Office: (617) 585-5678 or  www.lyricstage.com

One reason to see this holiday treat is to watch an actor have such a damn good time on stage. After Frank Capra pitched the “It’s a Wonderful Life” movie role of George Bailey to Jimmy Stewart in 1946, Stewart replied, “Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel named Clarence, I’m your boy!”

Substitute  ‘Spiro’ for “Frank” and that’s what Neal A. Casey must have said when Lyric Stage Producing Artistic Director Spiro Veloudis proposed the idea to Casey.

First things first. While you might enjoy Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” without having first read the story, it would be a tougher slog if you are one of the few who hasn’t seen the Frank Capra film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Playwright Steve Murray had to cut an hour from the 130-minute movie. The play hurtles along with the speed of a rambunctious one horse open sleigh and if you’re not familiar with the original movie, you could fall off when the thoroughbred gallops from one scene to the next.

The program summary:
“Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls, a small New England town, near the end of World War II. George Bailey, one of the town’s good citizens, fears he’s failed his family, his friends, and his town. In despair, he considers suicide, until Clarence, a dotty angel-in-waiting, shows him how bleak the world would have been had he not lived.”

Or even more succinctly as Casey says in his introduction, “A story of a man on a bridge, how he got there, and how he found his way home.”

Neal A, Casey plays all the characters in Murray’s New England Premier of “This Wonderful Life.” George Bailey, his wife Mary Hatch Bailey, Old Man Potter, Uncle Billy, old pal Sam Wainwright are the mainstays. Add up his children, an apprentice angel and everyone else he plays and you’re north of two dozen.

The movie has taken on iconic status during Christmas time. Changing the story line or sentiments will not do. "People have such expectations," Mr. Casey says, "and I have to respect that. I have to connect with their familiarity, and have some fun with it."

One of the endearing aspects of this production is that he does have fun. Using a few props, body language, twitching eyebrows or furrowed brow, and dozens of voice changes to suit each character, Casey is clearly enjoying himself. A moment he drops a prop, garbles a line, or a robust sneeze from an audience member leads to a playful ad lib. And Casey delivers a dead on imitation of Jimmy Stewart in several scenes.

Despite the gooey Hollywood storyline, the movie and the play have an edge to them. The bad breaks dealt to kind-hearted, visionary George Bailey drive him to a bridge from which he can hurl himself. His banking business has just about folded. The good works of his life haven’t brought him success. He knows the insurance policy in his pocket makes him worth more dead than alive. The Christmas Eve scene as George completely unravels in front of his family stings the audience as well as his family. The guy who can always find a silver lining has lost his prospector’s touch. Into the snowy night, he heads for the bridge, wishing he'd never been born.

Sweet ironies abound as Clarence the apprentice angel figures out a way to intercede with George's suicidal intentions. Clarence hits his stride when he shows George how different Bedford Falls would have been without his ever being born. Mr. Casey rat-a-tat-tats a handful of quick roles that show the rough and tumble underbelly of a town bereft of hope, bereft of George Bailey's stamp. George recognizes his worth and dear Clarence earns his wings as an angel.

George heads home and receives the news that his fortunes have changed, his bank saved by an infusion from a boyhood pal. Redemption is at hand and the audience, with more than a few tears, cheers the boisterous outcome of goodness over grinchiness.

Director Jack Neary’s tight 75-minute production is staged tidily enough for Casey to set up each scene. Jenna McFarland Lord’s spare two-tier set of a banker’s desk, porch doorway. bar, stairs and bannister to his home’s second floor and the bridge ominously looming at rear center stage is all Casey needs. Dewey Dellay's taped sound effects work beautifully to capture a breaking window, other end of a phone conversation, crowd noise, or Bailey's famous splash into a pool that takes place early in the play and film.

Like George, we’ve all gripped the rails of our bridges. peered into the deep, and experienced existential moments of uncertainty and self-doubt. We know the forces that can drive any of us to the precipice.

This seasonal little play reinforces the notion that there’s a “Clarence effect” present in our lives. Our good works do not go unnoticed. Somebody, somewhere, is paying attention.

Photos courtesy of www.lyricstage.com

Brendan: Irish-born playwright Ronan Noone comes to terms with America

“Brendan”
A play written by Ronan Noone
Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston
October 12–November 17 | $15-$50 | 617.266.0800

This little play feints and jabs for the first few rounds but about halfway through an uninterrupted ninety minutes it begins to land tender blows to the viewer’s heart. Any play that features the doppelganger of the main character’s recently deceased mother on stage with him for the full length of the play had better have some powerful hooks to go the distance.

“Brendan”, Ronan Noone’s new play that began a run at the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theater Friday night, is a sweet, imaginatively drawn coming-of-age story.

Dashiell Eaves plays Brendan, a self-doubting, terminally shy 25 year-old Irish immigrant who fled Ireland and his mother five years ago. He learns the date of his citizenship hearing the same day a letter informs him that his mother has died. After a shaky start, the pas de deux in which Brendan works out his karma with his salt o’ the earth, compulsively intrusive mother is a quiet wonder to behold.

Parallel to this narrative is Brendan’s tentative entry into Boston-ish American mainstream culture, conveniently populated by fellow Irish immigrants and a female neighbor as much in need of emotional salvation as our Brendan.

Watching scenes in which Brendan and his unmarried downstairs neighbor can’t connect verbally even though they feel strong emotional tugs might resonate with playgoers who’ve experienced similar timid moments. We want to shout “Yes!” when his mother, sitting in a chair in the corner, says, “Ask her if she’d like stay and have a cup of tea!”

The supporting cast, all of whom have dual roles, play their broadly drawn characters with gusto. Ciaran Crawford as Steve O,  Natalie Gold as Rose, Tommy Schrider as the brother of the female neighbor in the apartment downstairs, and Kelly McAndrew as the classic heart o’ gold hooker all make the most of their turns on the stage.

The play’s anchor is Nancy E. Carroll in the role of Brendan’s long-suffering mother. Invisible to all but Brendan, she’s as powerful a force beyond the pale as she was in her lifetime. She plays her role with wallops of dry humor and an Irish accent as thick and natural as the peat beneath the sod of the Emerald Isle.

Her wish to see her son succeed was coupled with enough smothering motherly advice to send him packing to America. Even from the first row of the mezzanine, you can see her eyebrows rise in disdain for some of her son’s new world choices in buddies, girl friends, and clothing. 

Alexander Dodge’s sets, pulled onto and off stage on tracks or rollers by the cast, are imaginatively designed. The Irish bar opened and closed from one side of the stage, Brendan’s one room apartment on the other, and the car Brendan learns to drive, make exquisite use of the technology of the Wimberly Theater stage.

Suffice it to say, we’ve all had ‘issues’ with our parents. Ditto for trying to find our niche in society and figuring out how to initiate a relationship, Somewhere between the lines of this play may lurk Noone’s own transition from Irish immigrant to American. Is it coincidence that Ronan Noone cast Brendan as a house painter, a job he held before finding his métier as a writer? Or that one of the pivotal moments is a scene Noone actually witnessed outside his Boston apartment?

In one entertaining riff directed straight at the audience, Brendan lists all the Irish-isms he’s dropped for American slang (“Brilliant!” not “Cool!”). The play is billed as a comedy but anyone familiar with Irish humor understands that a good laugh is often wrapped around disappointment and loss.

With its affecting light touch, “Brendan” helps us reflect on the need to find our voices so we can connect with the people who are important to us and grow into the human beings we (with or without the encouragement of our mothers) yearn to become.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

“A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams
New Repertory Theater in residence at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
Watertown, MA
September 11 - October 7, 2007
Running time 3 hours 15 minutes with two 10 minute intermissions

A streetcar named Desire rumbled through the rowdy streets of 1947 New Orleans delivering Blanche DuBois to her sister Stella’s cramped one bedroom apartment where she lived with her husband Stanley Kowalski. The streetcar couldn’t have caused any more of a tragic mess had it plowed right through the tiny apartment in their blue-collar neighborhood.

One spectacular reason to find your way to the New Repertory Theater Company’s production of Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire” in Watertown is Rachel Harker in the role of Blanche DuBois. Harker’s incandescent performance nails Blanche’s incremental decline from quiet desperation to madness.

It’s a bear of a play to stage - thousands of words of dialogue, sustained emotional range required from the four principal actors, and running time of over three hours. It can wear down all but the most involved actors, let alone an audience. And of course there’s the 1951 Elia Kazan film adaptation that hurtled Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh to fame.

Todd Alan Johnson as Stanley, Marianna Bassham as Stella, Rachel Harker as Blanche in the New Repertory Theater Company production. Photo Boston Globe.

Under Harker’s command, Blanche’s coquetry, rage, desire to be loved, dysfunctional sexuality, deluded sense of gentility, and a stubborn incapacity to acknowledge the smallest of self-truths, flash like facets of a Cartier diamond.

In a first week performance, the nearly packed house broke into spontaneous applause after Blanche’s gut stoked tirade about Stanley that begins, “"He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's something even sub-human-something not quite to the stage of humanity yet!…”

Blanche mismanaged and lost the family’s large home, Belle Reve, in Mississippi. She was fired from her teaching job for seducing a high school student. Before journeying to New Orleans, she “had depended on the kindness of strangers,” men whom she solicited in a flea bitten hotel in Mississippi. Harker’s deconstruction of Blanche comes from some visceral place that most of us don’t dare to plumb.

Todd Alan Johnson seems miscast as Stanley. The sexual tension that underlies the antagonism between him and Blanche is not present. Nor is chemistry obvious between him and his wife Stella.

His rages and the alpha dog mentality that fuel relationships with his wife and friends are loud but disconnected. The high-pitched voice he affects in his fits of temper is brittle and monochromatic. I never saw the 1951 film but bet that no matter what the pitch, Brando’s voice had to be laced with wily or transparent testosterone. The final bedroom scene between Stanley and Blanche is disappointingly flat and anti-climactic.

Marianna Bassham as Stella refracts more convincingly against Blanche than with her husband Stanley. There’s nitro but not enough glycerine to make us buy into her lust for Stanley and her acceptance of her life style of men’s night out bowling leagues and revolving card games. Stella’s guilt and relief when she agrees to institutionalize Stella will cost her.

Compared to the hefty dialogue time for Blanche, Stella, and Stanley, Bates Wilder’s Mitch seems more of a sketch than a bored-in character. Blanche’s flirting with him is desperate and doomed. Perhaps Wilder underplays Mitch’s own desperation and yearning for connection.

John R. Malinowski’s setting is especially gritty, close quartered, and utilitarian. He fashioned  the Kowalski's apartment upon a dais with an alley that crescents around it in a semi-circle, and a semi-opaque  second floor apartment where the neighbors argue. Neon signs from nearby stores and bars beckon from the perimeter. For the observant, he adds subtle changes in the apartment’s décor that underscore Blanche’s presence from act to act.

Frances Nelson Mc Sherry’s costume design is very 1950s. John Malinowski’s lighting is straightforward on/off to accommodate brief scene changes.

Tennessee Williams grew up in a dysfunctional southern family and was no stranger to sexual tension, violence and loneliness - the themes that vein his plays.

To some incalculable degree, whether expressed overtly or experienced internally, these themes inhabit our own emotional fabric. We may loathe Blanche’s deficiencies but we understand something about the demons that throttle her.

Mike Daisey's "Monopoly..." at the American Repertory Theater:Zero Arrow Theater

“Monopoly! - Tesla, Edison, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the War for Tomorrow.”
Created and performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
May 1-May 5, 2007
Zero Arrow Theater, Cambridge, MA
617-547-8300
www.amrep.org

Two minutes into portly Mike Daisey’s monologue and he’s got it all going on. His pudgy round face is a theater all by itself. Eyebrows rise, fall, twitch. Eyes squint, roll, stare. Mouth and lips contort to give charge to the words coming from them. Voice thunders, wheedles, quietly slows to gently massage each syllable.                                                                                     Photo from amrep web site

Occasionally all of that plus whatever else of him is visible from behind the table he’s sitting at, his only prop other than a glass of water he seldom sips from, go into herky -jerky or balletic pantomime to buttress the words of the story. He’s a one-man band of a storyteller.

Tonight’s roller coaster is “Monopoly! Tesla, Edison, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the War for Tomorrow.”   Whatever happens tonight may be different from yesterday’s or tomorrow’s monologue. Daisey has no fixed script. He glances at a one-page outline of each of the dozen or so vignettes in his show, takes a deep breath, and re-imagines the story.

And, if we believe Daisey’s intent in the second of three monologues presented by the American Repertory Theater, we in the audience bear some of the responsibility for how it turns out. Daisey’s Director’s Notes, printed prominently in the theater foyer, proclaim he “tells the tale fresh for each and every audience using whatever energy you bring with you to make new discoveries along the way.”

Ahhh, the audience as enablers. Right away I’m hoping that the other 149 people who’ve purchased tickets have read this and are prepared to lean into their oars for his ninety-minute monologue.

Thirty minutes into the show and I’m wondering what I would have to smoke to connect these stories in such brilliant ways. He’s made a quilt of stranger than fiction accounts of the Edison-Tesla AC/DC electricity saga; the history of Parker Brother’s most famous board game - Monopoly; growing up in rural Maine; experiences when he fled to Seattle (including being cast in an industrial video with Bill Gates and Daisey’s gonzo attempt to use a lightning bolt spewing Tesla Coil in a theater monologue); and the impact of Wal-Mart on small town America,

Using stories about his small town sister or big time inventors Edison and Tesla, Daisey gives us fascinating microcosmic lessons about history, economics, and capitalism on a very human scale.

Occasionally, Daisey gets mired too deeply in his self-admitted obsessions with capitalism or history and that’s where we can't help him out. If he senses the audience’s eyes glazing over from too much information, he pulls the pin on a hand grenade of humor, outrage, or mimicry to remind us we’re in a theater. If he doesn’t feel us fading (as in last Thursday’s performance for a couple of stretches), we feel like we’re in a lecture hall at Harvard.

With beautiful timing, Daisey creates hauntingly silent pauses in which you feel the audience holding its collective breath. What makes this a theater experience instead of an alpha male storyteller dominating a living room or bar room is Daisey’s notion that it’s not all about him exclusively. “We’re navigating the space together,” he said at a recent “Talk back” session with an audience.

Extending the metaphors he’s created with Edison and Tesla, Daisey ends his show saying, “Tonight you are charged and you will not dissipate.” And it dawns on us that if we could think as globally and non-linearly about our own lives, obsessions, and preoccupations as Daisey, we might generate enough electrons to illuminate our kitchens for an hour or so.

By then, the final statement in Daisey’s Director’s Note, “The alchemy of live performance makes our hearts larger, and our imaginations brighter than any of us can achieve alone” rings true.

Tickets still available
TONGUES WILL WAG – a special workshop performance of Mike Daisey's newest monologue!
One performance only! Tuesday, May 8 at 7:30 pm at Zero Arrow Theatre. Tickets: $20 - buy online or call 617.547.8300

Mike Daisey's "Invincible Summer"

INVINCIBLE SUMMER

Created and performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
April 4-29, 2007 at Zero Arrow Theatre
Zero Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA 617.547.8300
http://www.amrep.org/invincible/

Mike Daisey’s stories seem to spin straw into gold. He riffs on the weather in Seattle, wedding toasts, parental divorce, his move to New York City in an oppressive August heat wave, the New York City subway system, and the morning of September 11, 2001 which found him in lower Manhattan drinking coffee and preparing to deliver an overdue book manuscript to his publisher. This is what became his “Invincible Summer.”

Photos from amrep web site
For his show at Zero Arrow Theater, Daisey sits on a chair at a wooden table a few feet from the first row. His only props - a glass of water and a lamp. At the beginning of each vignette of his monologue, he glances for a few seconds at what appears to be an outline, then spins the story. This is steeplechase theater. The careening highs and lows of Daisey’s emoting opens us up to our own experiences with grief, anger, loss, hate, and love. His use of humor, irony, and a face and voice of enormous elasticity, act as foils for the denser parts of his stories.

Aside from his experience of 9/11, Daisey’s stuff is much the same as our own, but retold a million times better. If you’ve ever been in the spotlight as you spun a story at a dinner table, you get a sense of how hard it is to keep an extended story alive. Daisey has a natural way of caroming off audience response and using it to gather intensity as the story resolves. With no smoke and mirrors in sight, he connects every strand at the end of ninety minutes.

Daisey spends months refining the vignettes and delivers them extemporaneously. ”We’re navigating the space together. I’m aiming for the truth without boundaries between me and the audience," Daisey said in a “Talk Back” session after a show last week. This is the 19th time he’s performed “Invincible Summer.” He has nine monologues in various stages of development.

Daisey started performing in an unheated garage in Seattle ten years ago. He’s been a guest on The Late Show with Dave Letterman and been heard on NPR.

“Moments happen that shift your life. All that happened before that becomes nostalgia. 9/11 and my parents’ divorce are two examples,” he said. Mike Daisey’s gift to the audience: On the way out of the theater, you find yourself wondering where those shifts took place in your own life.

Daisey’s upcoming productions at Zero Arrow Theater
Tongues Will Wag - Mike Daisey's newest monologue is about dog culture, baby culture, and the essential choices we all face. Special workshop performance May 8 only - tickets $20 - call 617.547.8300.

MONOPOLY!
May 1-5, 2007

"Fat Pig":Neil LaBute serves up theatrical mixed grill

“Fat Pig”, a play in one act by Neil LaBute
Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company
Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts through April 7, 2007.
Running time 100 minutes, no intermission
For tickets and information, go to www.speakeasystage.com

If your view is that the world is a pretty cruel place, watching a Neil LaBute play is not likely to change your mind. His plays have a way of cracking the codes of dysfunctional or damaged people and inflicting them upon the hapless within their range. In “Fat Pig”, playing at the Calderwood Pavilion he lobs another one into our midst.

“Fat Pig” has a couple of powerful actors, grossly funny humor, and moments of poignancy. It illuminates the brutal effects of peer pressure then leaves us with the message that love is not enough to overcome it. This has the potential to be a theatrically rewarding experience if the two main characters infuse their struggles with nuance and complexity.

Photo from Boston Globe
The play’s first scene, a chance meeting in a cafeteria of tall lean twentysomething Tom with a plus sized -let’s get it out of the way, fat - young librarian is delightfully awkward and tentative. Some self-deprecation on Helen’s part, gauche foot -in-mouth remarks by Tom, lead to an unexpectedly good-natured conversation and a date to meet for dinner.

Both of them have relationship issues. Tom  (James Ryen) wouldn’t be able to identify his feelings in a police line-up. Helen (Liliane Klein) has endured marginalization as a plus-sized woman for her whole life.

You want to root for them to manage to swim against the current. With the right partner, Helen just might have the strength to stay the course. “I’m ok with it (her size), the trick is to get other people to feel the same way,” she says. With someone who loves him unconditionally, Tom might find the courage to withstand the onslaught of derision heaped upon him at the office or the ridicule of others he imagines as they see the couple in public.

The play’s scenes switch between ones in which Tom and Helen fumble around toward intimacy and Tom’s cubicle, which represents the cold, cruel world. Tom’s colleague Carter (Michael Daniel Anderson), preoccupied with Victoria’s Secret body shapes, his need to play seek-and-destroy with his own women, and his (family) connection with obesity, mercilessly belittles Tom’s friendship with Helen.

Tom’s former girlfriend, colleague Jeannie (Laura Latreille) in accounting, represents another kind of woman, one who’s had to put up with her share of loser guys, and can't believe her former beau has dumped her for a “fattie”.

The strident performances of these two supporting actors give the play its edge.

Carter is the play’s venomous Oracle. Time and again, he uses searing humor to expose ugly realities of people’s aversion toward the overweight or otherwise different. The audience’s laugher is spontaneous and often followed by a collective reflex of ‘How could I have laughed at that?’

Jeannie is a complex brew of hurt, rage, and self-loathing for having put up with so many “spineless shits” of men who disappoint and reject her. Her emotional meltdown late in the play is breathtakingly visceral and brought spontaneous applause from a stunned audience. Would that we hear or see such plumbing of depths by Tom or Helen.

“Maybe they don’t deserve it but that’s what they get, gay, fat, old, all of it. We’re all one step away from what we despise,” says Carter. Is he right?

Powerful theater gels complexity and ambiguity with humor, pathos, and humanity. Carter and Jeannie each show us a slice of the vulnerability and hurt that drive them. Helen speaks the words but doesn’t evince the daily ache she must bear at being judged by her appearance. Tom, unable to take a stand on anything but his accounting sheets, plays the same spineless character from beginning to end.

If it were to end badly, as it does, it would have been far more satisfactory to see him go down with a bang, not a whimper.

Sacred Hearts: a provocatively layered play - parishioners consumed by miracles and media

Sacred Hearts, a play in two acts by Colleen Curran
Zeitgeist Stage Company
Black Box Theater
Boston Center for the Arts
Tremont Street, Boston, MA

This play has it all. Relationships, popular culture, religion, miracles, the odd skeleton that’s buried within everyone’s closet, and the piranhas known as the media.

A woman witnesses what is construed as a miracle. The overwhelmed woman’s reluctant and confidential disclosure to her priest is overheard by a church busybody. Within five minutes of the play’s opening scene, the secret is out. For the next two hours, the story deepens, widens, and is resolved - perhaps.

Through an alternating series of deliciously well-acted flashbacks and real time drama, the play gains momentum by the minute. Everyone angles for a way to profit from the “miracle.”

Busloads of the faithful arrive in the small town. Secrets are divulged or divined or speculated. Reputations are maligned. Religion becomes a commodity. Reporters trample over private property and personal rights to privacy. The woman’s veracity is questioned. Speculation becomes news. Talk shows natter.

A sensational event. An all-consuming media response. People on the margins of the story craning their necks or raising their voices to be seen or heard on TV or radio. Does the parade of events sound familiar?

Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist web site

The power of the play stems from the way each character poaches on the personal boundaries of the miracle’s solitary witness, Bridget (Eliza Lay), a dropout law student turned shepherd in rural Canada.

Small town newspaper owner, editor, and married man Evan (Curt Klump) sees a chance to boost circulation. He threatens to use confidences he learned from Bridget as he thought about straying from his marriage when he befriended her.

The parish priest Father Phil (Ed Peed), apparently shuttled off to this Canadian outpost because of his radical activities on behalf of the poor in El Salvador, sees a chance to reinvigorate his advocacy for Third World causes.

Bridget’s brother Tim (Greg Maraio) visits with an agenda to persuade her to complete her degree and return to the lawyerly destiny he sees as hers.

If you’re lucky, you witness one over-the-top performance in a play. “Sacred Hearts” has two and several excellent ones. They drive the plot with the force of a pile driver. Gretchen and Violet sparkle. The audience in the tiny Black Box Theater spontaneously applauded after scenes in which these actors shined.

Gretchen (Melissa Baroni) dreams of becoming the next Geraldo. Disarmingly ditzy and possessed with exquisite comic timing, she nonchalantly invades Bridget’s home with a video camera and an agenda to manufacture an “investigatory feature” on why the miracle occurred to Bridget. Her mimicking of a Fox News-type reporter is farcical and a terrific send up of how networks sensationalize news.

Violet (Renee Miller) is consumed with the fact that a miracle has occurred in the midst of this small town. The fact that she’s learned of it by eavesdropping on a confidential conversation does not deter her from wanting to trumpet it to the public. The fact that Bridget doesn’t want anyone but her parish priest to know sets Violet off on a “public’s right to know” crusade. Violet’s belief that she’s acting on behalf of the “faithful” is unshakable. That we begin to wonder whether she’s got a point is a credit to Miller’s simple fervor and conviction.

Lay’s Bridget anchors the drama. Bridget’s life is complicated and messy but on a scale we can relate to. She’s smart, vulnerable, and has faith in her religion. The miracle she may have experienced ironically threatens to unearth a secret that propelled her to migrate to this tiny village and abandon a promising career.  In the back of our minds, mightn’t we all wonder whether a secret in our lives could surface to embarrass us if our lives were put under a microscope, as Bridget’s is?

Playwright Curran and Director David J. Miller provide us with complex, very human characters, not stereotypes. By the play’s final scene, we have enough knowledge to think that their basic humanity may insulate them from the brittle ending that might befall them if Geraldo Riviera were to come to town.

For more about the Zeitgeist Stage Company see  

How I Learned To Drive

How I Learned To Drive
A play in two acts by Paula Vogel
Devanaughn Theatre at the Piano Factory
791 Tremont Street, Boston, MA  02118 (617.247.9777)
February 1 - February 18

How I Learned To Find The Devanaughn Theatre could be the prelude to witnessing your first play there. Just locating the entrance at the edge of a parking lot behind Bob’s Bistro on Columbus Avenue in Boston’s South End is an adventure.

The term ‘theater’ might be a stretch in the case of the Piano Factory, the home of the Devanaughn Theatre. Inside, you can fly a paper airplane from one end of the room to the other. The two rows of audience chairs are practically on top of the spare but effective set. Romanesque arch patterns in the two exposed brick walls rise twenty feet to the ceiling and once could indeed have surrounded an industrial piano enterprise in the early twentieth century.

Watching a play in a space not much larger than a living room can be an intimate experience. Add a generous helping of good acting and a tightly constructed play and the result is powerful. Throw in a theme of sexual abuse and the space becomes downright uncomfortable.

The Devanaughn Theatre’s production of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is a twisted love story. The play centers around a relationship between a young girl and her uncle, who teaches her to drive. He’s patient, compassionate, and the only one who will listen to this conflicted adolescent. He’s also a predator. He teaches her how to drink and how to make love.

The story repels us as it draws us in. Li’l Bit, insecure, fatherless, growing up in rural Maryland, is vulnerable. She’s growing up in a dysfunctional family, has no friends in school, and becomes fascinated with what she perceives as the calm worldliness of the man who married her aunt. Of this play, Paula Vogel has said, “We receive great love from the people who harm us."

Li’l Bit was eleven years old when she took her first driving lesson with her Uncle Peck. The reenactment of that drive is one of several disturbing scenes in the play. Telling the story at that point as a woman in her late thirties, Li’l Bit said of that day, “It’s the last time I lived in my body.”

The play is set between 1971 and 1978 but jumps around in chronology. It’s sometimes hard to figure out the sequence of events because Li’l Bit tells stories from various points in her adult life and in the next breath the play returns to reenactments of disturbing experiences in her childhood relationship with her uncle.

Photo credit to Devanaughn web site (see below).

The relationship between Li’l Bit and her uncle is as complex as it is wrong. He’s the anchor who grounded her during seven years of a painful adolescence. He’s the man who dragged her into a miserable adulthood, which she may just survive, not only in spite of but possibly because of him.

The play does not in any way justify the Uncle’s pathetic behavior. Alex Zielke as Li’l Bit and Kevin Ashworth as Uncle Peck bring the right quantities of obsession and self-loathing to their characters.

It’s a tribute to Vogel’s writing and the Devanaughn Company’s acting that we feel anything but antipathy for Uncle Peck. She examines the tricky terrain between Li’l Bit’s vulnerability and her complicity in their relationship. Questions about the roles of denial and forgiveness linger long after Li’l Bit has taken her last drive.

Wayne Fritsche, Molly Kimmerling, and Jacquelyn Therieau Stachel serve as Grandpa, Grandma, Auntie and a host of other small parts throughout the play. Under the thoughtfully balanced direction of Dani Duggan, they work seamlessly as characters and a sort of Greek Chorus.

The play mercifully has moments of levity but it rolls to its downhill conclusion with the power of an eighteen-wheeler. We know it’s out of control. We know it’s going to crash. We just don’t know who will survive.

The small venues in Boston continue to offer some of the best values and theater experiences. No matter where you live, Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” is worth the trip to the Boston’s South End.

For more about the Devanaughn Theatre http://www.devtheatre.com/  

Wings of Desire, brilliant or baffling?

Wings of Desire
Directed by Ola Mafaalani
American Repertory Theater
64 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
November 25-December 17, 2006
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

The American Repertory Theater always produces sound and fury. Sometimes it signifies nothing, sometimes it baffles and sometimes it produces brilliance. Often it occurs within the same production.

Case in point: Wings of Desire, a stage adaptation of a Wim Wenders 1987 film of the same name.

The screenplay is heavenly. Two angels, Damien and Cassiel, are assigned for eternity to observe and catalogue human behavior. Damien begins to question his lot to live a spiritual existence and begins to long for human contact, physical sensation of biting into an apple, and for love. He observes Marion, a lonely trapeze artist, falls in love with her, and over time decides to shed his wings and descend to earth to join her in the mortal world.

Most of us eye heaven as a place in which our worldly burdens melt away - the ultimate oasis where we bathe in pools of harmony and respite. We’ve experienced the crests and troughs of love and might envy Damien’s benign existence. But we understand the power of a yearning heart. Even though we know the costs and the disequilibrium that often attend love, we root for Damien make the leap.

What could be better? An angel willing to sacrifice heaven for an earthly love falls for a trapeze artist, of all people, a beauty who nightly soars toward heaven and earthly fulfillment. Beautiful irony. The handsome angel and the gorgeous trapeze artist in a cosmic collision that promises heat and light.

It never happens.

The set over which the aerial artistry takes place is spare and effective. The stage, stripped to its black rear wall and up to its forty-foot ceiling, suggests heaven and earth. The rooftop of a white canteen wagon parked at center stage acts as a perch for the two angels to view Earth. A pair of musicians play and relax to stage left, various characters, and local news personality Robin Young, take turns occupying stage right.

Suspended over all is the trapeze harness in which Smith frequently glides in stunningly sensual arcs. She seems most herself as she defies gravity. Longing for her from above is Damien, who has never felt its pull.

Between the philosophical conversations between Damien and Cassiel, other things happen. Music, loud and often inaudible, blares occasionally from the musicians. Robin Young reads the news. Other characters come forward to comment on the human condition. As a former angel who came to earth for his own reasons, Stephen Payne leavens the proceedings with panache. His gravel voiced cowboy philosopher in a rumpled hat comes across somewhere between a jaded hippie and a wise Zen monk. By the play’s conclusion, it isn’t at all clear that Damien will have integrated life and love as well as this free spirit.

Sand drifting silently down pools of light gives beautiful texture to the metaphor of the passing of time and suggests a channel through which mortals pass into heaven. Alas, the disparate elements and characters don’t add up to a coherent narrative.

Damien’s first steps on earth are acted out in an inexplicably madcap and manic rushing about the stage. It’s unsatisfying and out of synch with the romantically poetic nature he's demonstrated from his perch in heaven. The final scene with Damien flying sensuously with Marion would be a stunning act for the Big Apple Circus but it gives us no idea what Damien thinks of his choice to subject himself to the laws of gravity and vagaries of love. His ‘voice over’ during this flight suggests his ecstasy at being joined to Marion but seems awkward since there’s been so little exposition between them since his descent to earth.

So here we are again with the ART’s sound and fury, signifying something, I’m just not sure what.

"A Night in November", a candle in the darkness

“A Night In November"
A play written by Marie Jones, directed by Tim Byron Owen
Jimmy Tingle Off Broadway Theater
www.jtoffbroadway.com
255 Elm Street, Somerville, MA 02144  (617-591-1616)
2 acts, one 15-minute intermission, running time approx two hours

The play’s final performances are Friday, Saturday, and a Sunday matinee, December 8-10

We are putty in the hands of a gifted storyteller. With gestures, timing, and imagination, he can whiplash us from of tears of laughter to tears of grief within one deft scene. He can transport us to faraway places but the most powerful trips march to the interior.

In the Jimmy Tingle Off Broadway Theater in Somerville production of “A Night in November,” the storyteller’s journey becomes a mirror to any who have the nerve to acknowledge patches of hard wired ugliness that reside in the dark corners of our psyches.

Irish actor Marty Maguire portrays the transformation of Kenneth McAllister from a go along to get along Protestant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to a man of conscience, compassion, and action. His actions are not of the heroic stature that change the course of history but those of a man who comes to realize the life-sucking costs that hate and bigotry bring to himself and his country. And does something about it.

Photo: Avanti Studios
The lilting Irish inflection has an uncanny ability to plumb the range of human emotion. Maguire milks the nuances of Irish class dialects to portray a whopping twenty-six characters that make up the two-act play written by Marie Jones. Using a few props and a mannerisms which can register an attitude with a beautifully timed arch of an eyebrow or a full body mime displaying several feelings in slow motion, he constructs powerful characterizations which give the play emotional context and clout.

The play opens with Maguire portraying the scene in which his wife dragoons him into taking his father in law to the world cup soccer match in Dublin 1993. The match was a game actually played between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a game that determined who would play Italy in NYC for the world cup championship. 

Playing the roles of McAllister, other spectators, and the crowd itself, Maguire paints the disturbing, unfettered hatred of the Protestant fans toward their “papist” rivals. McAllister had grown up with and been part of the routine bigotry the Protestant majority had over the minority Catholics who live in a nearly apartheid section of Belfast but is repelled by the hateful ferocity of thousands of his Protestant countrymen, including his mercilessly racist, bigoted father. He registers revulsion then shame as he hears thousands of Protestant fans chorus “Trick or Treat,” a reference to a recent October 31 incident in which Ulster gunmen shouted “Trick or Treat” as they entered a pub filled with Catholic patrons and sprayed machine gun fire killing seven men. He’s appalled to realize that he’s too afraid of the mob to do anything but play along.

A seismic emotional shift has begun rumbling in his conscience as he struggles to find his center of moral gravity. The power of the play is watching this ordinary man question then defy the forces that he’s never questioned and have shaped his entire life. It is every bit the gut wrenching, soul searching struggle of a King Lear except with huge wallops of black humor that keep exploding the tension, and giving McAllister the stones to keep driving at full speed without headlights down his dark night of the soul.

The genius of the play is how Maguire uses everyday vignettes to deconstruct then reconstruct his unexamined life. The chit-chat of office politics and a marriage in which keeping up appearances is paramount demonstrate the power of everyday prejudice and the fear of straying outside the class norms. The last of several scenes in which Maguire acts out bureaucrat McAllister lording it over a Catholic man applying for work is the most quietly moving scene you will see anywhere this theater season.

McAllister’s struggle resonates with us in the audience. Safe to say, we’ve all been silent parties to casual prejudice or worse. And safe to say, we’re all carrying innate or learned prejudices that burrow into our psyches. Establishing dominion over them is one of the most relentless battles we face every day.

His stand against the eternal night of prejudice is not going to make the headlines but it’s going to make a difference in the one piece of Ireland that he can control - his own.

To any who read or watch the news, there’s no respite from seemingly intractable intolerance and hatred in every corner of the world. If there was ever a time we needed a Norman McAllister in our midst, it is today.

The play is a perfect embodiment of the proverb, “Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.”

 

The Ice Breaker- this play satisfies

The Ice Breaker, written by Davie Rambo, directed by David Zoffoli
The New Repertory Theater
Arsenal Center for the Arts, Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA
October 25 - November 19
A play in two acts, one 15-minute intermission, running time approximately 2 hours

Maybe this production is flying under the radar because it’s playing in the suburbs but ptatlarge recommends you make a reservation to land in Watertown before it closes on November 19.

This is one of the few plays you’re likely to see that successfully combines a heady mix of science and sex, content and context. That a play whose axis rotates around the subject of global warming can become riveting personal narrative is quite a feat. Without the compelling performances from the play’s two actors, it wouldn’t have happened.

The Ice Breaker, a play written by David Rambo and presented by the New Repertory Theater, satisfies. From the time that a brash young graduate student Sonia (Amy Russ) bursts into the quietude of the discredited former top-notch researcher Lawrence’s (Will Lyman) desert hideaway, these two seem poles apart.

Sonia is one complicated piece of work; her sense of urgency to debunk current scientific theory about the ice melt in the Antarctic is counter balanced by Lawrence’s long ago surrender to the forces that toppled his professional and personal life. In a whirlwind entrance, she demands that he read her thesis and uses every tool in her considerable arsenal to persuade him to do it. Is she a crackpot or the real deal on speed? It’s a joy to watch Russ’s Sonia show her precocious intelligence behind her funny, slightly manic, scientist-as-seducer persona.

Lyman’s Will isn’t impervious to her charms but he has his own reasons for refusing her request and advances. He’s chosen solitude and anonymity to salve the hurts of a train-wrecked promising career and painful divorce. Sonia’s uninvited presence reminds him of all he wants to forget.

As the two passionately discuss the dire scientific implications of core samples from deep inside Antarctica’s ice sheet, they’re boring into each other’s fragile emotional cores. With glacial momentum, their intellectual combat begins to create sexual heat between them.

Every time the play veers toward the didactic, it’s rescued by dialogue that penetrates the armor that has frozen the two scientists emotionally. Lyman is especially gifted at showing Lawrence’s inner conflict through his body language. And Russ often discharges tension with a mannerism or her perfectly timed twentysomething sense of humor.

The play revels in contrasts, The shoot from the hip young woman vs. the reserved older professor; the woman who isn’t above using her body as a bartering tool vs. the man who’s been burned in love and harbors a fearful secret about his marriage; a scientist who’s hanging her reputation on forecasting events vs. a scientist who’s devoted his life to explaining them. And then there’s the age-old mystery of why opposites attract.

Credit Director David Zoffoli for reining in the actors enough so they remain characters, not caricatures. The narrative arc of this play is satisfyingly organic. The casting of Lyman and Russ is brilliant. They’re allowed to evolve slowly and convincingly.

The play’s finale was open ended enough for us to draw our own conclusions about their futures. By then, we know enough and care enough about these two very human scientific seekers to believe that breaking through the ice has saved them from being locked in it forever.

Post Script;
News this week that 100 icebergs, broken off from the Antarctic, have been spotted floating north toward the shipping lanes off New Zealand, casts an eerie sense of reality to the play’s underlying theme.
http://www.breakingnews.ie/2006/11/03/story283744.html

The Waiting Room, by Lisa Loomer, disappoints

The Waiting Room, written by Lisa Loomer, directed by Janet Morrison
Brandeis Theater Company, Spingold Theater Center, Waltham, MA
October 12-22, 2006

‘The Waiting Room,’ written by Lisa Loomer, had potential. The themes - how standards of beauty dig into women’s psyches, how a largely male medical field lacks sensitivity toward women in crisis, and how profit and politics corrupt big time research hospitals - are a worthy trio of subjects that could be shaken into a powerful cocktail. Alas, what we’re served here is a cherry coke, a flat one at that.

Loomer’s attempt to cobble the themes together just doesn’t work. The play feels more like several sketches lifted from a playwright’s workshop. The setting, described in the playbill as “the past, the present, and often both at once” is awkward and often confusing. The three main characters meet in the waiting room of a hospital. Each woman appears to be from a different country - America (Wanda), China (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and England (Victoria) - and from different centuries.

What they have in common is medical men and husbands who don’t understand them or their medical plights. The subjects of breast cancer (Wanda), foot binding (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and hysterectomies caused by vise-like corsets (Victoria) are easy targets and have been mined thoroughly by other writers. ‘The Waiting Room’ doesn’t add any new insights to the subjects.

This production, recently mounted by the Brandeis Theater Company at the Spingold Theater in Waltham, MA, had a serious identity crisis. Its use of farce just didn’t gel with the play’s more dramatic aspirations. Dramatic impact was frequently diluted, if not entirely dissipated, by the attempt to inject sight gags into emotionally charged scenes. The second act, a shot at how "the bottom line" puts profits before patients in some research hospitals, seemed to be lifted from another play altogether.

Photo of the Waltham production
To add to the woes, the characters, with one or two exceptions, just didn’t have the acting chops to carry off either the dramatic or the farcical demands of the play. The four male actors lacked any sort of nuance; even comic sketches seemed out of their reach.

One thankful exception to the overall tepid acting was from Sara Oliva, as the American woman whose breast implants, all three sets of them, have probably brought about her breast cancer. When she swaggers in to the waiting room’, her “new tits” plowing ahead of her like the bow wake of a luxury liner, the play takes on life. The play sags every time it focuses on other actors.

Oliva’s characterization of Wanda, a working class Jersey girl, masks a life of ugly-duckling hurt behind outrageously vulgar humor. The pathos she invokes as she loses her breasts to cancer as the play grinds on through nearly two hours is a convincing tour de force of acting. Even her bravura performance doesn’t make the play worth the two hours spent witnessing ‘The Waiting Room’.

The Women, a play by Clare Boothe Luce

The Women, a social satire written by Clare Boothe Luce in 1936, runs for five weeks, thru October 21, 2006, in the Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in Boston’s South End.

Guys, I’m warning you, this is not an equal opportunity play. It is of the women, for the women, and by the women. And by George, they make the most of it. All 20 of them. There ain’t a Y chromosome in the cast. But pay attention, it’s good fun and is instructive, especially if you think you’re the one in your relationship’s driver’s seat.

The core of the play revolves around several women, from recently married to long and unhappily married. Thanks to their husband’s wealth and power, they’re thrown together in a cement mixer called Manhattan high society.  The 1930s were before Eleanor Roosevelt made charitable work fashionable. One of the highest callings for these women is gossiping about infidelities and aesthetic tastes. “Yes, darling, that dress cuts your waist in half, (pause…) and makes your hips look twice as wide,” uttered by one woman of whom it is said, “If you’ve got Sylvia for a friend, you don’t need enemies.”

Plays like this are seldom performed any more. No gimmicks, no snazzy sets, no extravagant costumes, just clever dialogue that resembles machine gun fire. The socialites’ verbal bullets are uttered with their white gloves on but are a blood sport for the Manhattan socialites created by Clare Boothe Luce in her 1936 play, The Women.

The story hinges around a discovery that the husband of one of the happiest married women has strayed from the marriage bed and is carrying on with a, sniff, common salesgirl from Saks.

The Speakeasy Stage production’s actresses dig their ‘jungle red’ nails into their roles with gusto. Nancy E. Carroll, Aimee Doherty, Ellen Colton, Kerry Dowling, Alice Duffy, Anne Gottlieb, Amanda Good Hennessey, Maureen Keiller, Mary Klug and Sonya Raye aren’t into playing with nuance here.

It was hard to tell whether the play’s lead character, Mrs. Haines, was underplaying her role or was overshadowed by the unadulterated camp of her peers but that was a minor distraction. There are deliciously, sublimely catty, over the top performances up and down the line.

Photo: Clare Boothe Luce in 1935 (www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0010.htm)

Luce introduces social commentary in several scenes from the women who toil for these rich self-absorbed prima donnas. “Lady, you ain’t felt pain till you had your baby on a cold kitchen floor, make supper for your husband, then go to work the next day with your insides hanging out” says the nurse to one socialite matron who whines about her hard delivery while lounging in her comfortable hospital bed and nibbling on bon-bons.

Other commentary comes from unexpected sources. When the heretofore happily married Mrs. Haines asks her mother what to do about her husband’s infidelities, mother, who's been through it all, replies, “Nothing.”

“Stephen’s not tired of you, he’s tired of himself. When we get tired of ourselves, we go shopping. We redecorate the house. Men never think of something so simple. They want to see themselves differently in the mirror of another woman’s eyes. There’s nothing like a dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his own wife.”

In between these commentaries on class and caste, there are more catty one-liners than sequins on an evening gown. “Keep your chin up…both of them,” says one friend to another who’s complaining about her husband’s peccadilloes.

The two-hour play loses some steam in the second act. A certain fatigue develops after so many clever one-liners and over the top acting in the same style, no matter how outrageous. An exception to this is the play’s chief scene-stealer Mary Klug, whose larceny is worth the price of admission as she camps up her role as the Countess de Lage. To accomplish that in a company of such terrific actresses is quite a feat.

The play withstands the test of time fairly well. Today’s ‘Desperate Housewives’ is ‘The Women’ with the y chromosomes added. Our hunger for portrayals of gossip, infidelity, and bratty behavior seems insatiable. We need such guilty pleasure when the news on the front pages is so damn bleak.

These women dealt with the ethos of their time the only way they could. They may have savaged one another in the gossip trade but they never felt more comfortable in any other company but their own.

The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh

This Pillowman is not related to The Sandman. The Sandman sends us off temporarily to the land of nod. The Pillowman sends people to the land of eternal rest. In one man’s opinion, both have our best interests in mind.

The Pillowman, a play by Martin McDonagh is the kind of theater that plumbs the macabre corners of our psyches, and manages to make us laugh as we cringe. The play finished its run at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown on Sunday. An epic 2 1/2 hours long, it loses its way from time to time but contains bursts of acting that are riveting.

A writer of stories that portray gruesome deaths that have a morbidly moral rationale is questioned about recent deaths in town that resemble the murders in his stories. During the course of the interrogation, we are left guessing about what is fact and what is fiction, both in the writer’s stories and in his life. Be prepared to feel whiplash as truth is interpreted differently by the play’s four actors.

Billy Crudup, Zeljko Ivanek, and Jeff Goldblum in a Chicago production of "The Pillowman"
Photo by Joan Marcus

Playwright McDonagh injects enough themes for several plays: artistic freedom, the power of love given and withheld, the real or imagined emotional scars we bear from our childhoods, the question of who is responsible when a fan acts out perversions written by a writer, and the need for the state to punish crime - no matter how guilty the accused may be.

We’re all complicated human beings, and the actors are up to showing just how we’re shaped by the accumulation of our experiences. The Pillowman, a mythic character invented in one of the writer’s stories, gently warns children whom he knows will meet with deep emotional or physical abuse in their future lives, and offers them a chance to avoid it by arranging their deaths in what appear to be random accidents.

Both the writer and his retarded brother have been abused by their parents; the police suspect one brother or the other committed the unsolved grisly murders in town. Like the daily headlines, conclusions often jump way ahead of facts; we’re continually off balance as we wonder whether what we’re hearing is true or is the public mask of each of the four characters.

“There are no happy endings in real life,” the writer says during his interrogation. The exception to his mantra comes from an unlikely source at the play’s conclusion and is satisfying, if not happy.

Steven Barkimer and Philip Patrone are terrific in their roles of two interrogating policemen. John Kuntz as the writer and Bradley Thoennes as his retarded brother often overact but when all four are firing on all cylinders the play packs a terrific emotional wallop.

The Maternal Instinct

The Maternal Instinct
Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA
March 30-April 16, 2006, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m.
Box Office: 866-811-4111 or online at www.ootbtc.com
$20 Adults $15 Students/Seniors (requested donation)
Running time approximately one hour 45 minutes

Having a mother is an experience we all share so there’s something for everyone to relate to in “The Maternal Instinct”, currently playing at the Boston Playwrights’ Theater. Making a choice to have a baby seems contemporary enough. All