Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 4

Babel, which invites us to contemplate a world, apparently in the near future, in which the human genome is so well understood that every person’s – and fetus’s – potential, including the potential for antisocial behavior – is determinable, and if a child cannot be “certified” while in utero as meeting the mandated genetic risk profile, the child will face lifelong legal discrimination thwarting most forms of career accomplishment. Abortion is freely available, and the resulting pressures to terminate pregnancies when a child is not certified are intense, as is the misery of potential parents whose gestating child is deemed uncertifiable, and probably a menace to society. We witness how these dynamics play out with two couples who are friends. Definitely recommended.

The play is an ungodly and irremediable mess, but it does demonstrate the importance of the proposition for which the central character was willing to put his career at risk, i.e., that more care needs to be taken, by industry and government alike, of secrets – their own and everyone else’s.

This is more a theater piece than a play, Caridad Svich's choral meditation on the plight of the earth and the humans who inhabit it.

This is playwright Chisa Hutchinson's their outing at CATF. I liked both of her previous entries, and she continue to wax both original and amusing, without slighting the serious messages she always delivers.

What did out critic think? The essential attribute of the play, the combative romance of Benedick and Beatrice (Dylan Arredondo and Anna DiGiovanni), is the only truly sacred element of the play. Dylan Arredondo and Anna DiGiovanni, give these principals a full-throated presentation, Arredondo leaning heavily on physical comedy and DiGiovanni on the more cerebral element. In the end, their predicament is that in their merry combat each of them has painted themself into a corner; they need to become lovers but for all their formidable brains neither can do it without the help of friends and a development in the subplot that gives them an excuse to reset their relationship. This problem gives them a delicate palette of emotions to evince: scornful derisiveness, hesitancy, hypocrisy, passion, rueful candor. Arredondo and DiGiovanni serve these changes up charmingly.

Dream Hou$e is awash in ideas, about Latinx identity, about generational wealth transfers, about gentrification, about memory versus history, about personal authenticity, about priorities, about the inherent value of things, about the TV biz, etc., etc., etc. You wouldn’t expect a package of all these things to be tied up neatly in a 90-minute performance, and it’s not. But still, this mishmash is undeniably exciting to experience, and I, along with much of the audience, walked out with a definite buzz on. The kind of buzz you get when you’ve just experienced something exciting and new.

To put the biggest problem in contemporary terms, terms which doubtless occurred to many members of the audience besides just me: Is this a play about Zelensky or is it a play about Putin? You can characterize it as the story of a small army’s gallant victory against a much larger and better-equipped force, or you can talk about it as the story of an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign foreign land in service of an improbable abstract notion of the invading country’s imperial rights.

there's hardly a joke that misfires, hardly a dance step that doesn't thrill, and hardly a song that doesn't connect. It all works together, and the audience will leave utterly sated. Not to miss.

Fires in the Mirror is Anna Deavere Smith's now-classic theatre piece about the Crown Heights, Brooklyn disturbances of 1991, the singular point of which is that it's impossible to know exactly what to think about those events either.

In the oft-repeated words of the character Sandy, sung in a hilarious patter-fest at strategic points in the musical of Tootsie, playing this week only at the Hippodrome, 'I know what's going to happen.' What's going to happen is that you will attend the show and have an uproarious good time.

Let’s stipulate that book writer and lyricist Tom Eyen and composer Henry Krieger were not Sondheim. What they gave us in Dreamgirls was serviceable, not brilliant, the result of a long development process largely aimed at repairing holes in the melodrama. The result: the company that puts on the show has a heavy lift indeed. But I have to say that ArtsCentric proves to have very strong arms.

Building on Adrienne Shelly’s sometimes grimly hilarious and frequently heartwarming 2007 movie of the same name, and realized for the musical stage by Broadway’s first all-female creative team in 2016, Waitress has been almost continuously on Broadway, apart from a COVID break which ended when the show was the first musical to reopen there. With great songs by Sara Bareilles, a strong script by Jessie Nelson, vivid characters, some surprising dance numbers, lots of sexy behavior, and a strong feminist message, there’s little not to like.

Mark Scharf is a master of the 10-minute play, except, perhaps, where he tries to use it to explore large themes.

There can be rational decisions to end one’s own life, but when such decisions are driven by most kinds of depression, which by definition are not rational, no one else, especially no one else touched by it, can make sense of it. And no string of “Whys” will bring us closer to an explanation. But comedy can at least supply insight into the dilemma.

Audiences need each other as much as the performers need audiences; in the aisles we feed off each other's energy, helping each other get the jokes, experience the pathos, and admire the performances. Steel Magnolias, is an excellent way to make our return, with plenty of jokes, plenty of pathos, and plenty of opportunities for actors to shine. Baltimore's Everyman Theatre's lovely production makes the most of these assets.

Given all the slapstick in this staging (jousting with pool noodles, silly sound effects, outrageous costumes, sending a coffin to a sea burial down a playground slide, tossing a babe-in-arms around like a fumbled football), the endless choruses of What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor in which the audience is encouraged to participate, the deliberately absurd doubling, it might almost seem at times that children are the target demographic here. But grownups will not be bored.

So while the course of true love does not run smooth when pursued by these slightly deranged lovers, it does in the end run true. All in all, then, this is a pleasing way for theatergoers to begin emerging from hibernation.

Playwright Payne's evident intent here was to illustrate the fullest range of things that can happen when Boy Meets Girl. Boy and Girl here are, respectively, a Wiltshire beekeeper named Roland (Christian Smith) and a University of Sussex cosmologist named Marianne (Ryan Gunning). We are plunged right into the multifariousness of possibilities as they first encounter each other at a party. Each version of the encounter starts approximately the same way, with Marianne venturing a pickup line about the impossibility of licking one's elbows. But in the first, he is not available, because he is still sorting himself out after a recently ended relationship. In the second, he is married. In the next universe, other facts are different, but he is again married. Only on the fourth a?oeGroundhog Daya?? variation do the variables permit them to proceed. And then we follow them in similar fashion through differently realized smorgasbords of first dates, him proposing, her cheating, him cheating, them breaking up, them encountering each other in a post-breakup context, etc.

Turns out Undine doesn't exist in the public records beyond 15 years back because Undine was born Sharona Watkins, and cruelly deserted her folks' lives to reinvent herself with a highfallutin' name and a highfallutin' profession. Now she needs to rebuild the bridges she burned and reclaim Sharona-dom because Undine-ness has collapsed on her.

While there are four characters in Kill Move Paradise, and they are endowed with names and hints at backstories, their individual identities don't matter much. They are unified more than distinguished, engaged as they are in a common enterprise, chorally addressing the same issues. Specifically, they are all African American men, all (apparently) killed by police gunfire, who are still coming to terms with the ongoing trauma attendant upon being born black and therefore vulnerable to what happened to them in today's America. And, having landed in an afterlife of some kind, they are required now to come to awareness of their present circumstances, and apparently to heal from the inner wounds their earthly lives have inflicted.