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Do not think "Fatal Attraction" -- the movie. Do think of a potentially fatal femme fatale, that very special woman that can twist both man and woman to do her will.
Fault Line is back on line with four more one-acts.
Fault Line is one of the few theaters in town that give aspiring actors and playwrights their first exposure. In fact, scripts come all the way from an agent in New York for production and feedback to his clients. Most of their productions are multi-scene plays running around 30 minutes. It's an interesting form, allowing a full-length story to be told usually by short scenes - some, mere snippets - in the time period. It can also be disconcerting if scenes are too short.
This small, storefront theater, though a black box, adds new and flexible set pieces with each new run. Some of the young actors are in more than one production, giving us a chance to see their ability to take on new roles.
Debbie Fabiano's eternally yours [sic] explores the accidental deaths of Vincent and Susan Tarezzio (Ted Falagan and Alicia Wright) and their subsequent traditional Italian wake. The stereotypically squabbling couple and their dog Tippy, en route to a vacation destination, are more intent on arguing than watching the road. Micha Hamilton's Mama Tarezzio is right on, an authentic grieving Italian mom. Kevin Hettinger plays brother Dominic, dramatically overbearing and occasionally over projecting. Orrick Smith's off-stage voice booms with authority.
Troy Maxson speaks from his gut. Life has not been easy on him, nor has he been easy on life. His home is in a Pittsburgh ghetto, where he lives with his wife and youngest son. He is a sincere man, a driven man, and he rules his family with a heavy hand. He builds fences around his small plot of land, fences to keep people out and, quite possibly, to keep the family in.
Like his weathered, old, wooden big-city house, Troy Maxson is stressed out. Death always seems to him ready for a confrontation. Years back, he'd become a near-pro baseball player in prison. As an ex-con African-American, his time to hit the big leagues hadn't come. It later passed him by. Damned if he's going to let his boy Cory play football in high school, even if that might lead him to college. He wouldn't have a chance at sports unless twice as good as white players.
The greatest drawback to the 4th annual Festival of Independent Theaters (FIT), now playing through August 3, 2002 at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake, is that it is not juried, resulting in an anything-goes policy. With nine companies performing in blocks of twos and threes in repertory over four weekends, FIT, while hosting three wonderful productions, reflects the unevenness of material and directing and is not yet ready for prime time.
The sixth annual Festival of Independent Theaters (FIT), a group of 10 companies without a permanent venue, close their 24-day run August 5-7, 2004 at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake. Events include eight one-act plays, two multi-media presentations, and numerous pre and post-show events. The cross-pollination among these companies could also make FIT an acronym for Festival of Incestuous Theaters, which can be a double-edged sword.
The eighth annual Festival of Independent Theatres' (FIT) kicked off their opening weekend July 14, 2006 and presented many diverse offerings by five of the eight participating companies.
Theatergoers can always count on WingSpan Theater Company producer Susan Sargeant to come up with little-known, rarely staged, but always excellent scripts. She then hand picks her cast and director, which results in wonderfully staged work and top-notch talent. This year's FIT entry is no exception, Something Unspoken by Tennessee Williams, directed by Gail Cronauer.
Second Thought Theater's production of Summer Evening in Des Moines by Charles Mee is a series of vignettes depicting wo/man's search for meaning. Underscored with great music, the play asks the universal question: How do people connect? Vignettes take the audience on a tour of forms of escape people use to make their lives meaningful. Edgar (Tom Parr IV) the puppeter, manipulates his puppets, Charlie (Erik Archilla) and Mortimer (Joel McDonald), his alter egos, with some very funny shtick.
Connie Evingson, an adept singer with a cool jazz style, is a popular Twin Cities performer. She premiered and developed her Peggy Lee homage at Illusion's Fresh Ink workshop series and then brought the show in for a regular commercial run. Evingson does not impersonate Lee, although her blonde looks and Scandinavian background would qualify her for that approach. Instead, she sings in her own style many of the songs identified with Lee and, in between numbers, narrates snippets of biographical material.
This provocative, trenchant, one-person play by Wallace Shawn (who conceived it to be performed in homes and apartments, for groups of ten or twelve -- and who performed it himself in New York for many months), is set in a cheap hotel room in an unnamed country where the hero (Paul Mackley), a functionary for a human-rights organization, lies suffering from a malaria-like illness which gives him the fever of the title and triggers a stream-of disjointed-consciousness monologue.
Probably because military demeanor is in the forefront of today's news, A Few Good Men is likely to attract even audiences who have already seen the movie. Set and sound go far in making Asolo Rep's presentation a different experience. Sharp, curt military drumbeats between scenes urge us to snap to attention. The American flag filling the backdrop casts a reflection that seems to go beyond the proscenium. Action taking place on four horizontally staggered levels and forestage also makes the whole house appear an extension of stage.
It's a big step from the musical comedies that are Theater At The Center's usual fare to a gripping, tightly-written courtroom drama -- especially one set in so hyper-masculine an environment: A Few Good Men takes place at a court-martial hearing in response to a marine's death on the likewise tension-riddled site of Guantanamo Naval Base.
Perhaps a subtitle for Fiction should be "Or Fact?" Like playwright Steven Dietz, characters Linda and Michael Waterman are authors who keep us wondering what's true. Having met in a Paris cafe where their stimulating conversation (at least as remembered by Michael) led to a marriage of 20 years, both have successful careers. After early "dry" attempts at creating literature and a month at Drake Writers Colony, he became a best-selling novelist with annual movie adaptations.
Could I sit through yet another performance of the oft-seen Fiddler on the Roof, I wondered? Indeed I could at the sterling presentation by Derby Dinner Playhouse that won my admiration from the outset and held my undivided attention throughout. One of the great works of the American musical theater, Fiddlerwon the Tony Award for best musical of 1964. Tonys also went to nearly all the major theater names who brought it to life, including Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, composer and lyricist; Joseph Stein, librettist; and Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer.
Playwright Lanford Wilson delightfully manipulates the American variant of English, turning drama into comedy and comedy into drama. He writes, "Somewhere there is a portrait of him that is going through hell," when describing a man who refuses to age in the last fifteen years. The Fifth of July brings 60s Berkeley radicals together on July 4th, 1977. They have changed from the days of free love, protest marches, and getting and staying high. The current events take place at the Talley summer place in Lebanon, Missouri.
Torrid lighting! A thin gushing of water from the mouth of a lion's head fountain. A soprano's thick operatic intro, soon to be matched by the ravings of Domenico Soriano, master of the Neopolitan house. Or is he?
Of three Filumena translations I've seen, Timberlake Wertenbaker's gets quickest to the heart of the matter and stays there. It's a struggle between ex-prostitute Filumena Marturano and her arrogant, straying lover Domenico Soriano for the acknowledgment of their relationship. It's a Big Fat Italian Family thing. For a family, there needs be husband, wife, children -- all with one name and preferably under one roof (that is, entitled to the property).
What if an adoptee, in search of her birth-mother, finds a complete family of eccentrics? Even an embarrassment? Even more? Playwright Stephen Storc asked himself that question and answered it with Finding Mother. Start with Mr. and Mrs. Average American, Jacky and Richard Chandler (Courtney McMillon and Nick Kennedy) and their two average kids, a teenage daughter (Liz Lansing) and preteen son (Steffen Calac). Add Jacky's desire to find her mother.
Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases is a devastating portrayal of privileged young males who slide into the drug culture and lose all ambition and sense of reality while pursuing rock- band fame in New York's East Village. That may sound like a hackneyed film plot cobbled by Hollywood recyclers or a Rent ripoff minus music. But Rapp has transcended the genre with his cold-eyed scrutiny of pathetic slackers and his disgust at their wasted lives.
Since heading off to Kentucky for an apprenticeship with the famed Actors Theater of Louisville, Robert Simmons has peeped back on the Charlotte scene a couple of times. Now after a powerful lead last month in Victory Pictures' Kiss of the Spider Woman, he's back as production manager of Finer Noble Gases. Better still, he's rejoined his dad, Michael, as VP of development at Vic Pix. The significance of that comes clear from the moment you enter the Central Avenue Playhouse.
You get off the subway in Astoria, Queens, and you enter a world of middle-class, well-kept row-houses as well as lower-middle-class, multi-story walk-ups. There are many tales behind those doors. Playwright David L. Patterson weaves a delightfully humorous yet warm and, occasionally, passionate story with Finger Painting in a Murphy Bed.
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful doll who wanted to be a real girl. Or maybe the foundation of this newest play by Arthur Miller is the myth of the sleeping princess. Whatever its metaphors, the Doll is a film goddess reduced to infantile incoherence -- running naked through the halls, squalling when confronted by scary grownups, crying for her nurturing acting-coach - in the middle of a location shoot, surrounded by a flock of worshippers all looking out for their own interests as they struggle to revive her.
Dealt with in 1964's After the Fall, Marilyn Monroe reappears, center of attention, in Arthur Miller's roman a clef, Finishing The Picture. Now 89, Miller returns with Monroe, here as a brunette and called Kitty, in a nervous-breakdown, halting production of the 1961 John Huston western, "The Misfits," which Miller wrote and turned out to be Monroe's and her co-star, Clark Gable's, last picture. Lampooning acting gurus Lee and Paula Strasberg, known here as Jerome and Flora Fassinger, Miller settles old scores.
All of New York City circa 1915-33 is on Theatre Works' intimate stage, but it doesn't seem crowded - except with talent. Fiorello! capsulizes the career of Manhattan Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The lively musical shows him "On the Side of the Angels" from his days as a lawyer for "the little people."
Taken from field interviews with Appalachian coal miners and their families, Fire on the Mountain offers stories of their lives and their relationships with each other. Punctuated by authentic music of the area, played on familiar instruments but just as often rendered a capella or to feet stomping rhythmically, themes emerge: Both lands and laborers have been exploited, yet the people love their land and each other. Vivid slides on both sides of a bright blue backdrop picture miners' sooty faces or legs deep in mud or bodies tensed as arms swing axes.
In studies of post-WWII European dramatists, scholars tend to prefer the more accessible satires of Friedrich Durrenmatt to those of Max Frisch -- or could it be that the protagonist of The Firebugs is a humble citizen, disturbingly similar to ourselves? Certainly, Gottlieb Biedermann (whose name translates "God-Love Everyman") is not a monster: his transgressions are petty, his intentions benevolent, his concerns private -- all adding up to a vision so myopic as to make him a perfect pigeon for the arsonists to whom he extends his hospitality.
We've all done it!
That is, we've all purchased something through the mails. More than once we've gotten the wrong item. Few of us, though, purchased stemware and receive pornography. Alas, Francis and Peter Hunter (Carolyn E. Wheat and Frank Remiatte) did just that in Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot's hilarious farce, No Sex Please, We're British, the current offering at PowPAC.
The Fireside, one of the most amazingly successful regional dinner theaters in the country, produces a handful of musicals and dramas each year. Although each attracts a sizeable audience, no production sells more tickets than the annual edition of A Fireside Christmas . (That's why performances begin in mid-October.) This is the 13th annual edition of a show that warms the hearts of literally thousands of viewers each year. To paraphrase some well-known lyrics, the show is a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll, and a whole lotta holiday cheer.
If the Gordons were painters, they'd be splatter-artists, the kind who hurl paint at a canvas and pray that it makes pictorial sense. In The First Picture Show, they not only deal with a big time-span -- the years 1893-1995 in the USA -- but attack a slew of subjects and themes: the making of silent films, the role of women and Jews in that era, history, racism, old age, sibling rivalry, censorship and religious fundamentalism.
Nicky Silver's Fit To Be Tied begins with Arloc (Joey Landwehr) explaining his situation during the holiday season -- his situation being somewhat unhappy, unloved, and frustrated. An unopened, much-feared letter rests on a table. Alas, 'tis the holiday season when there is good cheer, so Arloc picks up boy-toy Boyd (Brennan Taylor) for a romantic interlude that includes just a touch of S and M. Alack, best-laid plans go askew as his strange mom, Nessa (Jill Drexler), thrusts herself upon him, having packed her unmentionables and left her second husband.
Ten years ago this sure-fire crowd-pleaser was a huge hit at Geva Theater directed by Pamela Hunt with musical direction by Corinne Aquilina. Now with the addition of choreography by Mercedes Ellington, it promises to be an even bigger success. The music, mostly R&B and mostly by Louis Jordan, is mostly iresistible, and six gifted and charismatic artists perform the hell out of it.
500 Clown Macbeth distills the theme of deadly ambition from the Shakespeare classic into three clowns atop an unstable scaffold. They reach fruitlessly for a crown hanging from the theater's ceiling and challenge the audience to be more than passive spectators. Director Leslie Buxbaum Danzig works well at building suspense as the clowns, while making precarious additions to their scaffold, come closer and ever more riskily closer to the desired crown, which is always just out of reach.
Lee Atwater stated that he did not create the dirty tricks of politics. No, he wasn't the father, but he was the S. O. B. that honed dirty tricks into a fine science and then taught others, such as star student Karl Rove. Robert Myers' Atwater: Fixin' to Die, currently at Cygnet Theater, traces his short history from his first forays into politics to Chairman of the Republican National Committee and his untimely death from brain cancer shortly after his 40th birthday.
Jane Martin's peculiar, outlandish title for her/his latest foray into the American Zeitgeist makes perfect sense when you realize this comedic assault is inspired by cross-breeding the schtick of those lame old "Code of the West" B-movies with the platitudes and conventions of horror flicks.
In Flaming Idiots, playwright Tom Rooney spreads his farcical humor across the stage with a spatula, adding dollops of slapstick, shtick, satire and pure theater humor. Director David Kievit's cast doesn't miss a chance to milk a line 'til the last laugh echoes through the house.
Set in the mythical town of Grapplin in County Sligo, Flanagan's Wake is an improvised show; think of Tony n' Tina's Wedding with an Irish bent. Celebrating its fifth production year, Flanagan's been very popular with audiences in Chicago, as well as other cities. Zeitgeist theater actors take audience suggestions and volunteers to wave an entertaining plot. Yes, there are lots of laughs in the play, despite its setting at the wake of town favorite Flanagan and his 20-year fiance). Songs and other ephemeral bits pop up, as does a happy ending.
Farce is a matter of tastelessness -- jealous if not errant spouses and lovers, as well as outrageous characters giving weight only to trivialities.
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