Eric Berryman News

Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced members of the creative teams for all three of their 2021 Live Season productions, which will take place outdoors, socially distanced, and with safety prioritized.

Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced the recipient of the 2021 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and the 2022 Jay Harris Commission, as well as recipients of 2021 WTF Commissions through WTF’s Andrew Martin-Weber New Play and Musical Commissioning Program.

Following a year of unparalleled challenges and thrilling innovations, Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield has announced Williamstown Theatre Festival's return to live performances this summer – outdoors, socially distanced, and with safety prioritized.

Playwrights Horizons is presenting The MS Phoenix Rising, a serial dark comedy fiction podcast created by writer Trish Harnetiaux (Tin Cat Shoes, How to Get into Buildings) and director Katie Brook (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, How to Get Into Buildings), launching today (March 16).

On January 28, Frances McDormand and Kate Valk will host the first installment of Fran & Kate's Drama Club, a live Zoom series about The Wooster Group’s storied past, emboldened present, and speculative futures. Proceeds from the event will support The Performing Garage.

The Roundabout cast of Toni Stone will reunite for a reading for Play-PerView. The event takes place on Tuesday, November 10th at 7:00pm EST.

Theater in Quarantine, a pandemic performance laboratory from writer, director, and performer Joshua William Gelb and choreographer Katie Rose McLaughlin, has announced a new series of live-streamed performances that push the boundaries of live performance inside the digital space.

The Wooster Group's 2017 production of The B-Side: 'Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,' A Record Album Interpretation is now available to stream for free on the company's website through Monday, September 14.

Tomorrow, Harlem9, the Obie Award-Winning producing collective, begins the stream of their 10th Annual and 1st Digital Festival.  The Harlem based collective is no stranger to Black Playwrights, Actors and Directors who also make their living within the Theatre, TV and Film industry. 

Harlem9 recently announced that their 10th Anniversary would be Digital. Last year, 2019, was the first year that the Obie Award-Winning collective went National.

The Play Company today shared the series of Mini-Commissions they initiated in April, offering audiences digital access to exciting new works by artists creatively navigating the constraints of our times.

Everyman Theatre's Founding Artistic Director Vincent M. Lancisi is thrilled to announce that actors Felicia Curry and Helen Hedman have joined the organization as members of the Everyman Theatre Resident Company of Artists. Everyman Theatre is one of only a handful of Regional Theatres that has a resident company of professional artists as part of its mission.

Audiences can mark the 51st anniversary of the U.S. landing on the moon July 20 when Hammer Theatre Center and One Year Lease Theater Company (OYL) partner for a special presentation of Pieces of the Moon, a timely and compelling new play by Nick Flint adapted for radio, making its World Premiere via live stream.

The Play Company has announced #Playfrom6FeetAway Spring 2020 programming, a series of experimental new works and stimulating conversations that can be experienced together, even as we hunker down and shelter in place.

Among tonight's winners was the pre-Broadway engagement of Six the Musical. which took home Outstanding Visiting Production for its run at ART, while David Byrne's American Utopia was honored with Best Visiting Performance, Musical.

Two dozen nominations of outstanding actors, directors, designers and ensembles were announced today by The Boston Theater Critics Association (BTCA) for the 38th Annual Elliot Norton Awards.

In David Mamet's book On Directing Film, he breaks down the way a linear narrative can be conveyed by placing images in direct contrast to each other. a?oeThe dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.a?? Certainly, with a majority of the action taking place upstage of a scrim and the fusion of filmed and live material, ArtsEmerson's Detroit Red, an original play by Will Power about Malcolm X's early adult life in Roxbury, leaves one feeling more as though one has watched a movie or woken from a dream than sat through a performance. Recently, I also saw Gloria: A Life, which is playing at the American Repertory Theatre. While I admittedly found the show to be trite and pandering, it obtusely fused projection effects with live performance in a way that felt cheap, gimmicky, and more like a new SnapChat filter than anything else. Contrast that with Ari Herzig's film work for Detroit Red, which snaps the audience effectively between viewpoints in black and white and splays broad images across the haziness of Adam Rigg's nondescript set. The success of the production lies in the success of the filmed elements, which establish a framing device, pinpointing the action to an exact moment in time. Additionally, the projections act as effective abstractions, allowing the actors to waver between realism and poetry as photos of their faces appear as oversized watermarks in space. Lighting designer Alan Edwards equally contributes to the cinematic feel of the piece. Sharp shafts of light slice through open space and act, ingeniously, as the camera lens might in film, focusing our attention on specifics and the relevant details. Aside from a few extraneous hat changes for the three actors who take on all the roles in the piece, between the work of Herzig, Rigg, and Edwards, the performance seems to be a study in the logistics of jump-cuts or cross-fades in real time. Adding to the film-instead-of-theatre feeling in the space, the performance actively roused and engaged the audience, which had a huge swathe of Boston school groups present. The crowd felt comfortable verbalizing responses, in part, because of our physical separation from the action presented to us, and to be able to laugh, cheer, gasp, and grimace in solidarity with those around you is a rare treat.

ArtsEmerson will present the World Premiere of Detroit Red by internationally renowned playwright Will Power. This theatrical exploration of the life of Malcolm X as he dwelled and came of age in the Roxbury section of Boston, plays the Emerson Paramount Center Robert J. Orchard Stage February 01 a?" 16, 2020.

The much-anticipated MOBY DICK (A Musical Reckoning), from the team that brought you NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 in 2015, has finally surfaced at the Loeb Drama Center of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. Based on the iconic American novel by Herman Melville, the three-and-a-half-hour-long musical endeavors to theatricalize about 40 of the book's 135 chapters, taking a much larger bite from the source material than the mere 70- page section of Leo Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE adapted for THE GREAT COMET. Oh, would that Dave Malloy (music, book, lyrics, and orchestrations) and Rachel Chavkin (director, co-developer) had approached this project with such surgical skill, rather than casting the broadest of nets upon the waters.

Moby-Dick began previews on Tuesday, December 3 and opened on December 12 at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA. It plays through Sunday, January 12.