The folks at Company One don’t leave much to chance. When I arrived at the BCA Plaza Theatre, anticipating an interesting but wearisome six hours of theatre on a lovely fall Saturday afternoon, it quickly became apparent that any discomfort or confusion during the press viewing marathon would be minimized. I picked up a small […]
In the program notes of Knock! The Daniil Kharms Project, directed by Matthew Woods, dramaturg Matthew McMahan describes how the writings of Daniil Kharms were rescued by a friend, writer Iakov Druskin, from the bombed building the playwright lodged in; Druskin placed the “scattered remains…in a briefcase, and kept them hidden for decades.” A few […]
Don’t screw around with Shakespeare…unless you can make it hella-entertaining. This was the thought that pulsed in my mind as I watched the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of Comedy of Errors, directed by David R. Gammons. I was both excited and apprehensive about this show due to my own shifting views on one of Shakespeare’s […]
The audience enters the Arsenal Center Black Box, and is instantly greeted with music. Faraz Firoozabadi (percussion), Stephen J. Lamb (guitar), and Jacques Pardo (composer and sound designer), set the mood as we prepare to enter Iraq, the real and reimagined space offered by Amir Al-Azraki in Waiting for Gilgamesh: Scenes from Iraq, directed by […]
I had the best seat in the house, smack-dab in the middle of the first row, mezzanine level. I surveyed the scene from my perch: non-threatening pastels (light brown, cream, orange tones), a few armchairs and lamps, a large, slightly faded rug beneath the coffee table in the center of the large room. The Drayton […]
Entering the Factory Theatre’s space (possibly for the last time; RIP, Factory), I was greeted by the familiar bell-and-whistle tunes of an old-school arcade. We, the audience, sat around the thrust stage and faced the prize counter, with several toys hanging above it, a sign hanging in front of it spelling out “Welcome Home Lulu […]
I have a complicated task in this review: to try to defend a production of Hamlet in which I did not admire the performance choices of the eponymous character. It is a theater cliché (more like a truth universally acknowledged) that no production of Hamlet can stand without its protagonist. And yet, there were elements […]
Company One and the Boston Center for the Arts served up a full 24 hours of theater with their XX PlayLab, a free theater festival geared towards “propelling women playwrights.” Four plays and two panel discussions fostered fantastic dialogue between artists and audience, leading to exciting developments in existing dramatic works and uniting the Boston […]