Keith Waits - Page 10

I think I speak for the majority of liberal America when I say that the times we live in are exhausting. More than that, they are disheartening in a way that embitters us to the victories and further dampens the tragedies of our nation's storied past. It is difficult to believe that there will ever be a time when compassion, honesty, and simple kindness will become ubiquitous virtues again. One blip in this bleak outlook, however, is the promise of youth, the eternal hope that the next generation will finally get it right. Emma Gonzalez and the other survivors of the Parkdale shooting are testaments to that fact, and this cast of high school students' presenting The Laramie Project ties into that same spirit.

After the disappointment of canceling Waitress following the June 13 fire at the Kentucky Center, Broadway in Louisville kicks off the current season in spectacular style. The 2014 Broadway production of Disney's Aladdin flew into Louisville this week for an extended run.

On October 30, 1938, just before 8:00 pm, Americans gathered around the radio to listen to Mercury Theatre On The Air, an anthology series produced and hosted by Orson Welles. That evening's program, scripted by Howard Koch, was a modern-day adaptation of H.G. Well's The War of the Worlds, one of the first tales of alien invasion, in which Martians emerged from meteors to lay waste to all of the Earth's civilizations. Except that Koch, with help from producers John Houseman, Paul Stewart and Welles himself, structured the program to play, at least in the first moments, as special news bulletins interrupting a normal performance by a dance orchestra. The ruse seems thin even for the time, but Hitler had 'annexed' Austria a few months earlier, and was threatening to do more, so the program struck a chord and the resulting panic in the area in close proximity - Welles' Martians landed in a New Jersey pasture, sent East Coast residents scurrying across bridges and clogging highways.

Lucas Hnath's A Doll's House Part 2 opens with a knock on a door. Reid Thompson's haunting set design stretches across the Victor Jory Theatre with purpose, making the smallest ATL performance space feel somehow like the largest, and in in the center stands a door, tall, purple, and foreboding. The knock also begins small but grows louder and more insistent as no one comes to answer it.

If you were fortunate to be in the opening night audience of Commonwealth Theater Company's (CTC) production of Blue Stockings, you had the privilege to witness not only a brilliant performance but also a pre-show panel discussion entitled 'Leadership, Representation, and the Impact of Women in Higher Education: Past, Present & Future' with Sadiqa Reynolds, President & CEO, Louisville Urban League, Inc., Tori Murden McClure, President of Spalding University, Kimberly Kempf-Leonard, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Louisville, and CTC Outreach Director and production director Heather Burns. This discussion addressed the struggles of gender inequality and opportunity in the collegiate field. Diving into hard-hitting questions such as: is there room for all of us (all genders), and are women feeling more valued? while shedding light on the power of competence versus dominance, the panel provided a thought-provoking meditation for themes of suffrage and rights in Blue Stockings.

Not so many years ago, a person diagnosed with a behavioral and/or learning disability would have been sent to a 'special' school or home where, most of the time, just their basic needs were met, with little human interaction or development.

'In here, life is beautiful...' a phrase repeated by the Emcee of the Kit-Kat Club in Berlin. This emcee invites his audience to forget and ignore their troubles and hardship and indulge in a world full of dancing girls, flirtations, and decadence. Gritty, powerful and raw, Pandora Productions current production of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret is blistering and beautiful.

Nineteenth-century mansions always put me in a good mood on a cool September night. If there is a good story to go along with said mansion, all the better. Actors Theatre of Louisville kicks off the fall and its New Play Project with A. Rey Pamatmat's The Electric Harvest, a site-specific one-act set in the Conrad Caldwell House in Saint James Court (the bartender gave us the low down on its haunted history), but this isn't a traditional haunting story or really anything you would expect from the setting. The actors inhabiting the mansion, we discover, are caught in a continuous death loop, killed and brought back to life by a flock creepy bird-like demons.

Vidalia Unwin has been a playwright and an actor for several years in Louisville and the surrounding area. The Alley Theater, The Bard's Town, and Finnigan Productions have produced her plays. Most recently, Broken Iris made its debut as part of the inaugural Louisville Fringe Festival. It happens also to be the first play produced since the playwright, a transgender individual, has been in transition.

Let's return to the farmlands of Minnesota and visit some of the funniest Lutheran ladies that have ever graced a stage: the Church Basement Ladies. 'Rise Up, O Men' is the fifth musical addition to the continuing stories inspired from a book by Janet Letnes Martin and Suzann Nelson, entitled Growing Up Lutheran. Written by Greta Grosch, who was the original Mavis when CBL first appeared in 2005, this iteration allows a few of the men in the lives of the church to have a bit of the spotlight.

Bust A Move With the Good NewsAltar Boyz is one of the craziest, funniest things I have seen lately. A tongue-in-cheek satire not of God or organized religion per se, but of a particular type of hyperactive, relentlessly upbeat Christian entertainment that is pure, irresistible showbiz. The title is the name of a fictitious Christian boy-band on the last night of their national 'Raise the Praise' tour: Matthew (Cameron Conners), Mark (Michael Detmer), Luke (Tony Smith), Juan (Remy Sisk), and Abraham (Alfie Jones), who's Jewish and sports a yarmulke adorned with a glitzy star.

I can honestly say that Broadway's musical Two by Two was new to me, as was the TheatreWorks of Southern Indiana company. As I love to be introduced to productions and theater groups that are unfamiliar to me, I got two for the price of one. I know there has to be a joke in there somewhere!

We have of late become more and more aware as a society of the contrast in how we look at our selves and each other based on our differences. That we are waking up to this like the dawning of the new day also illustrates how we had allowed ourselves to become complacent about the dramatic changes of the past. As a White Cis Male, I had assumed that, once earned, the change could not so easily be rolled back, and that society would only become more progressive, more inclusive, more accepting, more compassionate. Current events prove the arrogance of that assumption more and more with each passing day.

In a recent social media exchange, a man related to me how he was not interested in watching Hannah Gadsby's acclaimed Netflix special because he didn't need to feel ashamed. I think he misses the point. The most important thing that art can do is force us to reexamine our biases and preconceptions.

Do creative imagination and madness go hand-in-hand? We too often talk about Van Gogh as if only mental illness could ever account for his genius, and there have been many stories told about how the people that seek refuge in the asylum might be escaping the insanity of a violent and unforgiving world.

When you see as much live theatre as I do, you inevitably have expectations, and one of the challenges becomes how to be fair about preconception. Ideally, a reviewer sits in the dark not knowing what they will encounter, but foreknowledge is usually the norm. You know the company, you know the play, you know the actors; its almost impossible to avoid.

The great playwrights touch on the truths that lie beneath the surface. Before I went to see this new production of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love (1983) I had been thinking about cycles, in particular how a new book I had just started outlined the rise of a reactionary conservative political movement built in part upon a fear of immigrants and divergent ideology. It swept a Republican into the White House after several years of progressive Democrat administration. It may sound familiar, but the book was describing the United States of 1952.

If you are like me you remember where you were when certain global events occurred, both positive and negative. I remember where I was when the Challenger exploded when the Berlin Wall came down...when a lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and began to shoot. When the smoke cleared there were 28 lives lost on that cold December day in Newtown, CT. While this horrible event happened nearly six years ago, it is still very much part of our political and social climate today.

Treachery, lies, high tension, deception...but enough about current political events, the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival is delivering a modern retelling of Othello. This tragedy delivers some excellent drama that is every bit as heavy as the humid Louisville heat and even more hard-hitting.

What more pleasant way to spend a summer evening than outdoors in the heart of Old Louisville, surrounded by green space, with some of the loveliest turns of phrase ever written in the English language wafting on the breeze? Thanks to Kentucky Shakespeare and its supporters, we can do just that - free of charge - virtually all summer long in Louisville. What a treat, indeed!