In 1977, a very lean year for drama, The Shadow Box won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, but lost the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award to David Mamet’s American Buffalo. “Disease plays” were fashionable then, but about this one, critics were divided. The more intellectual of them…

Unfairly, the word “amateur” is usually a pejorative term. The literal definition is “one who practices any art, study or sport for pleasure and not for money.” Unfortunately, “amateur” also can imply a lack of skill or finish, and such is the case with Theater Works’ current production of John…

If Forrest Gump’s mother was right (“Life is like a box of . . .”), then Arizona Comedy Theatre Company’s Coming Attractions is like a Whitman’s Sampler with all the tops pushed in so we know what we’re going to get. Four dedicated performers have put themselves on display with…

Cynics beware! Phoenix Theatre has booked a show as irrepressible as an untrained puppy. And like a puppy, this entertainment promises to knock you over and bathe your face with wet kisses, these of homespun wisdom. It will make you giggle with delight if you can withstand the Hallmark-greeting-card pretensions…

I was in my early 20s when Billie Holiday became my personal idol. Her heartfelt phrasing of the simplistic truths of Tin Pan Alley captured the ache, the wonder, the joy of my young soul as no one else could. She had died three years before I ever thrilled to…

In 1981, I attended the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where a new writer made a stunning debut with a series of monologues grouped together under the title Talking With. The festival was abuzz. Who was this mysterious writer whom no one had…

Brian Friel writes buckets of language that we are invited to smear over our faces as we greedily savor the taste of words, like blueberries plucked from the bush of memory. If this is an obscure image, you will appreciate it more after seeing Dancing at Lughnasa, presented at Herberger…

Some theatre historians have attributed the decline of theatre to the diminishing stature of the dramatic hero. Greek tragedies centered on kings and gods, Shakespeare’s plays on dukes and princes. By the time O’Neill wrote about actors, poets and prostitutes, Miller about salesmen and movie stars, Williams about football heroes,…

Samuel Beckett was arguably the most important writer for the theatre of our century. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, Beckett wrote three masterpieces for the stage: Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960). Many people would add Happy Days (1961) to this…

Grand Canyon University’s production of Georg Kaiser’s 1918 play Gas I has scored a bull’s eye on a virtual blind spot in my experience. Never having seen productions of Capek’s R.U.R., Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, or any of the 73 plays Kaiser apparently wrote in addition to Gas I, my…

What’s an O.J. junkie to do? That rascally Judge Ito recessed the Simpson trial for four days, and it looked like a long weekend, indeed, until I found myself at Phoenix Theatre’s immensely satisfying production of To Kill a Mockingbird. There is something inherently dramatic about trials: two sides in…

The first movie I ever saw was the epic drama Blood and Sand. Tyrone Power played the dashing Manolete, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived. With the dramatic flourish of a spangled cape, Arizona Theatre Company is presenting the world premiäre of Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s The Old Matador on the main…

Hosanna! Hallelujah! Hooray! The Herberger has a hit! We have been told that by acquiring a major league baseball franchise, Phoenix will become one of America’s premier cities. Until now, sunny Phoenix has languished in the shadows of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and Minneapolis–not…

At the university, Polonius boasts in Hamlet, he once was accounted a good actor. Hamlet cannot resist asking: “What did you enact?” Polonius brags: “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Hamlet teases him: “It was a brute part of him to kill…

When art depicts the pornographic, does it cease to be art? If pornography achieves artistic expression, does it cease to be pornography? What about W.H. Auden’s rapturous paeans to buggery, or D.H. Lawrence’s celebration of coitus, or that bawdy unknown ancient poet who wrote Satyricon, in which no perversion was…

The Immortals can rest easy. Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Sir Henry Irving, the divine Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Sir Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Jonathan Pryce, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes and, now, even…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s most exquisitely wrought piece of dramatic construction. Three tales intermingle to weave a magical web of three comic styles. Sophisticated romantic comedy featuring witty ripostes is the manner of the court creatures, ruled by Theseus and his new bride, Hippolyta. The rude mechanicals,…

It seemed absurd a few months ago to read the obituaries of Eugene Ionesco. Hadn’t he been dead for years? Was this a variation on the old joke about Franco? Overshadowed by the genius of Samuel Beckett, Ionesco’s plays have seemed like literary footnotes from the past, ranking with those…

Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre is an alternative theatre that features experimental work. Experimental work implies that the outcome of the procedure is unknown. Any true experiment poses the possibility of failure. It is therefore no crime that Planet Earth’s current offering, Liberating Mama, is a disaster. Laraine Herring has written…

Since I played Scrooge in the eighth grade, I have avoided all Christmas plays as a matter of principle. But this year, as a result of my new obligations, I was forced to spend a week surveying the local offerings of the holiday season. I have seen Mesa Community College’s…

“There is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst, that it doesn’t seem right to criticize.” Thornton Wilder thus quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his one-act play Pullman Car Hiawatha, the most substantial in an evening of three short works collectively titled…

“Family values” have been ballyhooed by politicians so mindlessly that it may come as a shock to take a good, hard look at a nuclear family from the Dark Ages. Phoenix Theatre affords us this chance with its production of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. The play deals with…