Theater That Matters

Theater That Matters

Four major theaters anchor the Berkshire summer season: the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. I’ve been covering their shows for a...
StageStruck: Fluent in Mametspeak

StageStruck: Fluent in Mametspeak

David Mamet’s territory is the burned-out shell of the soul. His best-known plays and films are peopled with losers clinging to pathetic illusions, spitting out their bitterness in the elliptical, fragmented language that has come to be known as Mametspeak. The...
StageStruck: Hazy Membranes

StageStruck: Hazy Membranes

The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of the great tragic love stories, as much a part of our collective unconscious as Romeo and Juliet’s. Lovers so deeply connected that when she dies, he follows her to the Underworld and sings his plea so beautifully...
StageStruck: Rethinking the Future

StageStruck: Rethinking the Future

Kate Maguire is in her 17th season as artistic director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. (See also “Theater That Matters” in this issue.) BTF is one of the oldest summer theaters in the country, established in 1928 in a jewel-box playhouse...
A Collective Journey

A Collective Journey

Stretching. I’m stretching out unused muscles and ligaments with about 30 other people on a drizzly afternoon in Ashfield. There are a few other grayhairs in the room, but most of the bodies ranged across the floor in T-shirts, sweats and bare feet are young and...