Stage
StageStruck: Ordinary People
Everyman is the archetype of medieval theater. The 15th-century play follows a typical, flawed human in his search for suitable companions to accompany him on his journey toward death. In the end, the moral is that only Good Deeds will see you successfully into the...
Stage Struck: Sex, Lies and Rock 'n' Roll
"In the spring, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of …" sex, suicide, masturbation, wet dreams, abortion—and other young men.Frank Wedekind's daring play Spring Awakening was years ahead of its time—so far ahead that it...
StageStruck: Dangerous Games
The liaisons in Les Liaisons Dangereuses really are dangerous. In Christopher Hampton’s 1980s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1780s epistolary novel of seduction and deceit, “the game” of sexual power and intrigue destroys two lives...Stage Struck: Dance Fusion
The cross-pollination of global cultures that gave rise to the omnibus genre known as world music has some equivalents in the dance world. This week, two different examples can be seen on area stages. With roots in Indonesia and the Pacific Islands, these visiting...
Strong Seasoning
A Man for All Seasons is a departure from the usual run of contemporary comedies, musicals and heartwarming dramas on the Theater Project’s stage. Robert Bolt’s 1961 play is a period piece, a doublet-and-hose costume drama written in elegant but not...
StageStruck: Homeward Bound
“The need to have a home and family is gone from most of the world,” mourns the central character in The Trip to Bountiful. She’s Carrie Watts, whose blissful childhood in a Texas farm town (its name deriving from the bounty of its crops) gave way to...
Art and Place
“We live on land long trod. We admire the landscapes the deer ran upon, the natives named and cared for, and our ancestors escaped to. And the landscape allows the dreaming.” Earlier this month, Double Edge Theatre hosted one of its Sunday morning...
StageStruck: Good News in Hard Times
During this winter of economic discontent, I’ve been talking with summer theater managers around the region to see how they did last year and, as spring turns toward summer, how they’re approaching the upcoming season. The area’s two Equity companies...
Blood, Sweat and Rewrites
“This is the fourth revision of the 10th draft of my play,” said Julian Olf, drawing an appreciative laugh from his audience. Most of the people who crowded into a Northampton living room on a recent Wednesday evening were playwrights, directors and...
StageStruck: Making Art While Making Do
It’s not a theater by any stretch. The low ceiling, whitewashed brick walls, folding chairs and bare-bulb lighting make for a less than salubrious performance experience. But the basement of Thornes Marketplace in Northampton, formerly occupied by Dynamite...
StageStruck: Raising Their Voices
“This goes out to those who don’t get a chanceTo raise their voices ’cause of the problems we have.We’ve been held back, we can’t let that go on.Now it’s time for us to speak outLet them know who we areAnd show them where we...
The Wisecracking Puppets Who Wouldn't Die
No matter the time of day, watch an old Mystery Science Theater 3,000 episode and it feels like the middle of the night. The show was set primarily on the Satellite of Love, an awkward-looking bone of a spaceship, where Joel Robinson (series creator Joel Hodgson) and...
StageStruck: Messy Lives
A lot of us conceive of Western Massachusetts in terms of the cozy, college-crammed, latte-happy Valley. But the Real World is nearer than we like to think, and it’s alive and well in the neighboring hilltowns. Or maybe not all that well, judging from Lucy...
StageStruck: Jesus' Farewell Tour
Back in the day, before Andrew Lloyd Webber got lush, he and the under-appreciated Tim Rice wrote a tuneful rock opera with the cheeky title Jesus Christ, Superstar. It had all the life-and-death anguish, impassioned arias and massed choristers of grand opera, set to...
Women's Roles
One is considered Shakespeare’s most “masculine” play. The other takes place in two largely female domains: feminist academia and the minimum-wage workplace. This weekend, those contradictory worlds clash in two productions on area campuses, both of...
StageStruck: Chekhov's Eye
“But suddenly,” says the narrator of Anton Chekhov’s satirical short story “The Death of a Clerk,” about to describe an unexpected, life-changing sneeze. And then he pauses. “This ‘but suddenly’ occurs often in...
StageStruck: The Good Ear Review
There’s a new kid on the cyberblock, a child of mixed parentage and ambivalent identity. The Good Ear Review is an online literary magazine that celebrates the art of the dramatic monologue—short one-character sketches that capture character, place and...
StageStruck: Cop Shows
One man is running for his life, and one is running his life into the ground. One of them has the look of a classic vigilante cop from TV and movies, but he’s no knight in dirty armor. The other is the hero of a classic spy thriller who now finds himself in a...
StageStruck: Back to Back to Basics
The 10-minute play is a relative newcomer to the contemporary stage, but it has grown like ivy. Numerous festivals, how-to courses and script collections are devoted to the mini-genre, which has also spawned a particularly addictive variant. The format’s...
StageStruck: Passionate About Plays
“There’s a great belief in Amherst that conversation and dialogue can actually produce change,” says Zak Berkman. “The idea that if you can get everyone in the room to talk about something, it can affect the community as a whole.” Berkman...
Dramatically Digital
The Metropolitan Opera was the first to burst the bounds of its own stage to stream high-definition digital transmissions of live performances to cinema screens around the country. Then Britain’s National Theatre started beaming plays from its home on...
The Anti-American Idol
DUMBO is one of those New York City revival neighborhoods with acronymic names and nouveau hip reputations. Nestled literally in the twin shadows of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) boasts gentrified galleries,...
StageStruck: Still Clowning After All These Years
“Gould and Stearns have long had at least three sides,” says the Gould half of that duo. They are consummate clowns and committed social activists, as well as having distinct individual careers. This weekend, Peter Gould and Stephen Stearns celebrate 30...
StageStruck: Jazz Age Shakespeare
If music be the food of love… vo-de-oh-doh! In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, young Viola, shipwrecked on an alien shore, disguises herself as a boy and becomes the go-between for the local duke, Orsino, in his fruitless courtship of the local countess,...
An Unserious Man
They say that ignorance is bliss, so I shut my mind off so I could attain Nirvana. I think I shut my mind off for too long because I attained Foo Fighters instead. Local stand-up comedian Sharkee Katz—aka Daniel Linton—didn’t make the cut during his...
StageStruck: On the Road
Even before he graduated high school, Daniel Plimpton was ready to hit the road. In 2008, while still a senior at the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter school, he auditioned for the national tour of the musical Spring Awakening. Two years and four callbacks...
StageStruck: Sexy Stew
The title itself might raise a couple of eyebrows. And the content of Tricky Wicked Bitch could elevate them a little more—especially because this award-winning play, written by a Smith College junior, has been chosen as the production for graduation weekend,...
StageStruck: Crossing the Line
The title alone should be enough to get your attention: How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less. It’s one of five short solo works written and performed by women, comprising a two-state festival with an equally whimsical title, O Solo Mama Mia! And for this...
StageStruck: Pesticide for Bullies
Why do you laugh when I’m myself?Not that funny kind of laugh but the hurtful one.Why do I go home feeling hurt every dayuntil pain overcomes my whole bodyand tears through my brain…again and again, until I almost believe your lies. Narelle Thomas, a...
StageStruck: Ch-ch-ch-changes at PVPA
When the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School moved from temporary digs in Hadley—a funky, improvised assortment of rented accommodations—into a shiny new purpose-built facility in South Hadley, the students had a saying: “I used to go to...
StageStruck: Tasty Pasties
Most of the stage shows I attend are comparatively restrained affairs, with actors sticking to their scripts and the audience sitting attentively. But last Saturday was an altogether different theatrical experience. It was casual, noisy, cheeky, unpredictable and...
Stage: Going, Going, Gone
Their venues are unusual, their aesthetics unorthodox, aimed at upending conventional theater practice. And the shows these two companies open this week and next tell us as much about the theaters themselves as they do about the human dramas they depict. This weekend,...
StageStruck: Pulp Fiction
“Different times, different prohibitions,” says the proprietress of The Well. It’s 1956, and this daughter of a Prohibition-era bootlegger runs a Chicago nightclub catering to lesbians. Vivian is one of the five characters, all women, in Pulp, a...
A Majestic Summer
The Theater Project has generally filled the hot-weather lull between its nine-month seasons with concerts and musical cabarets. This summer adds a full theatrical production, Stones in His Pockets, a two-man play about a couple of locals in rural Ireland...
Legacy of Dance
Dance fans longing for a peek at the new generation of ballet artists should get a treat when the Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble (celebrating its 40th anniversary) appears as part of Jacob’s Pillow Dance 2010 Festival. Its program, the group’s first...
StageStruck: Countdown to Summer
Zero Mostel was a larger-than-life personality and an outsize talent. Jim Brochu is no featherweight either. As a youth, Brochu idolized that rhinoceros of an entertainer, then grew into a body that rivals Mostel’s impressive physique, and now has created a...
StageStruck: Looking at Mortality
This is a big year for playwright/poet/teacher/activist Magdalena Gomez, who has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors in the past few months. For example: Teatro V!da, the Springfield-based youth theater company she founded, was named 2010 Outstanding Arts...
Strangers on a Train
In this time of economic uncertainty, when a lot of theaters are sticking with the tried and true, Chester Theatre Company is going for something untried and new for them. Three-quarters of the company’s four-play season will be given to Arlene Hutton’s...
Public Choreography
In the center of a paved cul-de-sac, in the middle of an otherwise empty field, stood a woman, statue-still, absorbing the fading evening light. She wore a magnificent hoop skirt that looked from a distance to be made of rose petals. Her arms were frozen in the air. A...
Field of (Broken) Dreams
I’m not a native New Englander, but I’ve been a Red Sox fan long enough to have had my heart broken in 1986, when an impossible series of errors cost them the World Series and for many fans confirmed, yet again, the intractability of The Curse. The...
Stagestruck: Let My People Go
I had just finished E.L. Doctorow’s epic novel The March, which traces Sherman’s bloody campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas that ended the Civil War, when I caught up last weekend with The Whipping Man. The play, which opens the summer season at...
Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight
Stephen Sondheim is unquestionably the most influential figure in musical theater of the last half-century. His acerbic lyrics, angular melodies and world-weary themes have changed the personality of the Broadway show. Outside the rock musical and Lloyd Webber...
StageStruck: Players with Problems
The Hampshire Shakespeare Company is beset by problems this summer. The notorious misogyny of the season’s opening show, The Taming of the Shrew, creates a problem for any director. Shakespeare’s predominantly male dramatis personae present a perennial...
StageStruck: Summer Britcom
Two fall-out-of-your-seat-laughing British comedies kick off summer in the Valley. New Century Theatre opens its 20th anniversary season with a revival of one of its all-time hits, Noises Off. And the Royal National Theatre’s production of the 19th-century sex...
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
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
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
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
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...
Collective Endeavor
“The more problems you’ve got, the more fun you have. The audience loves seeing the problems and how we solve them.” Director Kevin Coleman is in a circle with four young men, discussing a scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in which...
WTF Is Going On!
By some measures, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the northern anchor of the Berkshires’ summer arts scene, is twice as big an operation as its sister theaters, Shakespeare & Company, Barrington Stage Company and Berkshire Theatre Festival. Much of this is...
StageStruck: Defying Convention
The first two weekends of this year’s Ko Festival of Performance demonstrated the scope of this summer carnival of theater that defies and redefines convention. A solo performer recounted a dozen real-life stories; a six-person ensemble enacted a single...
Stage Struck: Magic and Mischief
Hampshire Shakespeare Company opened its season last month with a tight, taut Hamlet that featured a thrilling, pyrotechnic performance in the title role. PJ Adzima is still in high school, but he brought not only an adolescent vigor that made the prince’s...
West Side Story
“I wanted to make this a working person’s theater,” says Julianne Boyd, artistic director of Barrington Stage Company. She’s showing me around the company’s mainstage theater on Union Street in Pittsfield. The company’s move here...
Stagestruck: Time Travelers
Shakespeare & Company isn’t only about Shakespeare, but the contemporary plays that comprise nearly half of this summer’s program share some common ground with the Bard. They are smaller works than Shakespeare’s sprawling masterpieces—of...
Stage Struck: Three for the Show
Arlene Hutton’s Nibroc Trilogy begins with one of the sweetest and funniest courtship scenes in contemporary drama. Two young people meet on a cross-country train at the beginning of World War II. Raleigh is a talker and a teaser, May shy and proper, and...
StageStruck: Kitchen-Sink Comedy
The plays of Alan Ayckbourn, England’s master farceur, are models of comedic structure, crafted from everyday situations that get hilariously out of hand. His trademark is structural gimmicks that play with space and/or time. Absurd Person Singular (a title...
On the Edge
The Berkshire Fringe’s name reflects both its geographical and artistic relationships to the area’s other summer theater festivals. It’s tucked into the southwestern corner of the state—though its host community, Great Barrington, has good...
Stage Struck: Rites and Responsibilities
The set tells us a lot. R. Michael Miller’s design for the Berkshire Theatre Company production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is an oh-so-typical prosperous suburban living room, with elegant furniture, orderly bookshelves and a well-stocked and...E-Edition
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