Usually the premise for a comedy troupe is quaint, maybe a little quizzical. Dead Parents Society answers your first question right away and rejoices in how uncomfortable it makes you. Its members all lost a parent at a young age and combine to give a portrait of grief that’s darkly, uniquely comic and all the […]
In Tennessee Williams’ extensive canon, The Glass Menagerie stands out as the original “memory play”: the work is framed as the hazy recollections of the main character, whose reliability as a narrator is an open question. Williams uses this to issue an invitation to actors and directors to fill in and flesh out those memories as […]
If staging the perfect murder is hard enough, staging a good murder mystery has its own challenges. With all the mischievousness of its main characters, Patrick Hamilton’s Rope dodges those responsibilities by flipping the script: the murder is made in front of us and the motive is the mystery. It’s been a while since thrillers […]
Shakespeare earned the right to phone it in. It was clear that even his less daring and promising works would be feted beyond their merits – anything bearing his name would get the benefit of the doubt when the same script by a lesser or less famous playwright would be passed over. More generously, any […]
If reality TV taught us anything, it’s that there’s little easier to lampoon than the lives of the rich and famous; long before and through the television age, Noel Coward recognized and exploited this wonderfully. His wildly eccentric charm along with his inimitable talent and style made him the darling of the aristocracy whose attention […]
The safest compliment for art is that it knows who it’s for. Stratford’s roster in a given year mostly consists of sober, supposedly thoughtful pieces aimed at some cross-section of a reliable clientele: there will be something for the Shakespeare crowd, a high-concept work that tickles critics pink, and maybe a disappointingly rote dalliance with […]
805-4821 (A) “805-4821 is a trans coming out story made out of other stories: a dialogue from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a half-remembered swim lesson, and an 80,000 word Facebook correspondence” This is how the promotional material introduces Davis Plett’s work, directed by Gislina Patterson. I added it to my roster expecting a show that could be […]
The label “immersive” is thrown around carelessly these days; Outside the March is working tirelessly to remind us all just what it means. Their latest project, Tape Escape, takes participants back in time and into a 90s video store – albeit with more brainteasers than the boarded-up Blockbuster down the street. This is a truly […]