Keith Waits - Page 4

In his curtain speech, Artistic Director of Louisville's newest theatre company and director of this production stated that both the company and The Mystery of Irma Vep were long-held dreams coming true.

As with most of August Wilson's work, King Hedley II functions as and can be easily accepted as, flavorful, heated melodrama. But, as the second to the last of The Pittsburgh Cycle, it is so much more. Wilson's plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, tell 100 years of African American history in a deeply layered narrative that can only be excavated through time. One single production will never capture it all, particularly if the audience is not familiar with the other plays in the series.

When Harvey Fierstein dropped this story on the world in1981 as Torch Song Trilogy, it ran more than four hours. It was a seminal work in LGBTQA+ theatre, a frighteningly intimate story contained within an epic timeframe.

When a 17-year-old boy gets brutally murdered at the hands of the police, a rising hip hop trio finds themselves at odds with one another as they decide to use fame to speak out or stay silent. Hype Man: a break beat play is ripped from the headlines, realistic and cool. Actors Theatre of Louisville's 90-minute production examines race, privilege, and points of view with vibrato as striking as the production's underscore.

Each time I review theatre written and performed in another language, my disadvantage forces me to think differently about what I'm seeing. I kind of enjoy the challenge but there is undeniable risk that I will not fully comprehend some of the detail and nuance carried in the language.

In biology, evolution is usually defined as '...the change in the characteristics of a species over several generations and relies on the process of natural selection. The theory of evolution is based on the idea that all species are related and gradually change over time.'

On December 4, 1956, four recording legends dropped by Sam Phillips' famously small Sun Records Studios for various reasons, completely unplanned and coincidental. Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash had both been under contract for some time to Phillips, though Cash's contract would be up soon and he wouldn't be renewing. Jerry Lee Lewis had just signed, and Elvis Presley had long since been sold to RCA. Never one to let an opportunity pass him by, Phillips got the four stars to record an impromptu jam session, and a musical legend was born.

Intrigue, plots to bring disaster. Humor, handled by a master. Romance, sex presented pastorally. Acting Against Cancer in collaboration with CirqueLouis certainly has magic to do as it opens another season with Pippin. This outright delight of a show hits the mark with tricks, tumbles, and flights of fancy as a young prince finds his way in the world.

In the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's controversial testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, on August 19 Louisville joined the growing ranks of cities to host a live reading of the Mueller Report.

In his opening night curtain speech, director Jeff Mangum referenced the Wayward Actors' Company 2018 production of Hand to God, which he also directed. David Ippolito's The Green Room is another unorthodox speculation about the contrast between the more inclusive Christian sects and their more extreme brethren.

The Ain't I A Women Playfest is one of the most ambitious theatre initiatives to be birthed in Louisville; a call to women playwrights of color for original short plays that speak, as new plays must, to the time in which they are written.

I have described Baby Horse Theatre as Avant-garde, and while the term is apt, it also is limiting in the way that all such terms prescribe how we approach art. Like all theatre artists, they are storytellers.

Theatre always begins as a mystery. Neutral Positions begins with three scenes that seem unrelated; disparate episodes whose relationship to each other eventually becomes evident. But for a tantalizing few minutes, we don't know. Our mind is working. We are thinking actively in hopes of finding the connections. The marketing has clued us in that there is a Theme, and it's a big one: the Death Penalty. So what does a broadly comic scene of a sixth-grade acting class have to do with that? How will the scene of two women, friends since childhood, preparing for a wedding, tie into state execution?

So much depends on identity during youth and adolescence. How others see you, what music you listen to, what you wear, and what crowd you hang out with. Trivial yet all so important at the time. Vidalia Unwin's fresh, new play, Punk Snot explores a group of outcast teens who find salvation and safety in the Punk rock scene of the early 2000s. Decisions, individuality, and anger of youth are juxtaposed against selling out, struggles, and settling down into adulthood.

David Clark's gods play wants desperately to be a movie, and it could very well be adapted as such with little difficulty. A heady mash-up of the visceral and intellectual, Clark imagines a playwright so full of himself that he declares that not even God could write a play better than his latest work. But it doesn't pay to challenge the creator.

Every year, more than 2 million kids in America will face a period of homelessness. This from Covenant House, the largest privately funded provider in the Americas of shelter, food, immediate crisis care, and an array of other services to homeless and runaway youth. That is a pretty sobering statistic, even more so when you consider that the majority, if not all, of that 2 million struggles in silence, unseen.

Among the greatest of the plays written by William Shakespeare, there are several titular roles that are each a veritable Mt. Everest for actors; Charlton Heston called them the 'Man-killers', and I doubt they are any easier for women. Of these, the monarch named Lear stands as a particularly daunting challenge. It has often been said that if you are old enough to truly understand the unique blend of aging, madness, and arrogance required to play it, you may be too old to pull it off onstage.

America since the 2016 election has provoked no small amount of questioning. How could it ever have come to this? Beyond the immediacy of partisanship, the GOP has set about dismantling landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. It has sent us reeling back in time to reexamine modern history for clues, and also to seek comfort in moments in which we felt secure in the march of progressiveness.

Now comes the third chapter in director Amy Attaway's 'Game of Kings' series, which began with Richard II in 2017, followed by Henry IV, Part One a year ago, and will finish with Henry V in the summer of 2020.

Edward Albee has a spurious reputation for writing difficult, inaccessible plays. While the esteemed playwright is usually challenging to mainstream audiences, The Goat Or, Who is Sylvia? functions surprisingly well as domestic farce. It is often flat out funny.