Attending Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of Othello, directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary, staged at The Modern Theatre at Suffolk University, I focused on John Kuntz’s Iago. He didn’t go for hand-rubbing evil villain; he didn’t laugh maniacally during his many asides to the audience. He wasn’t particularly smooth-talking or violent. In fact, he was mostly […]
The Huntington opened its 34th season in September with Stephen Sondheim’s romantic, waltz-infused musical A Little Night Music. Full of sumptuous tunes, gorgeous costumes (design by Robert Morgan), and great performances, the production does justice to Sondheim’s dreamy, romantic tale of, as director Peter DuBois puts it, “sex and death.” Led by the warm and […]
Interviewed by dramaturg Jessie Baxter, young playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel spoke about how writing a certain distance from the past helps her produce convincing work: “In high school I wrote a play about middle school, and in college I wrote a play about high school…I like to write when I have a bit of perspective, […]
Greetings, humans. We have genre variety this month to keep your reading palate happy. Two novels, two biographies, a collection of essays about America’s most famous playwright, and a collection of sketches of some of the greatest writers working today: Books In Hand: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life I excitedly impulse-bought Yanagihara’s book after hearing […]
Before the show even started, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins immediately won me over. I was at the BCA, ready to watch a performance of appropriate, the New England premiere of the play and a SpeakEasy Stage Company production directed by M. Bevin O’Gara. In the program notes, Jacobs-Jenkins pointed out how revealing laughter can be as […]
Writing about the Vietnam War, Mary McCarthy identified the slippery motivations hiding behind the conflict’s carefully-constructed terms. To make their methods sound innocuous, the American military referred to napalm as “Incinder-jell,” and to defoliants as “weed killers.” McCarthy observed that this “resort to euphemism denotes, no doubt, a guilty conscience, or—the same thing nowadays—a twinge […]
New Repertory Theatre seems to be the only company in the Greater Boston area that is acknowledging the centennial of Arthur Miller’s birth. They have wisely decided to veer away from Miller’s traditional masterpieces (All My Sons, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and A View from the Bridge) in favor of a later work […]
Wax Wings Productions took on Cassie M. Seinuk’s new play at The Inner Sanctum Gallery the first two weekends of August. Wax Wings is a daring group that does not shy away from the fiery challenges of life in the theater fringe; unfortunately, they missed the mark with this new work. Daring in its exploration […]