Can an actor’s performance be too good for a play? Apparently it can, if one performance so overwhelms the script that the depth and subtlety of the drama are eclipsed by the charisma of its star. Such seemed to be the case when I saw the touring production of Herb…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they grant our prayers.” For the past two seasons, I have been thumping a drum, decrying the decreased relevance of theatre to contemporary culture. Now, In Mixed Company has taken me at my word and is presenting a play…
If Peter Quince were alive today and living in Arizona, he might well be the artistic director of Southwest Shakespeare Company. Quince is, of course, that amateur entrepreneur of ancient Athens who organized a group of tradesmen to perform “the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and…
Delicate rectangles of light dapple a translucent scrim that masks the proscenium at Herberger Theater’s Center Stage. The tinkle of tiny cymbals begins to twang; our eyes penetrate the veil to behold a jewel-encrusted creature enthroned. With tawny skin spangled with golden dust, an ample human body is crowned with…
The Comedy of Errors and The Boys From Syracuse are twins, but they’re fraternal–not identical. The former is Shakespeare’s shortest play–and possibly his first. It is a tale of twins, separated at birth, who are driven to distraction when their respective acquaintances mistake them for each other. The latter is…
Lorraine Hansberry’s powerful drama A Raisin in the Sun is to the black experience what Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is to that of middle-class Jews. It serves as the bench mark of excellence for all subsequent theatrical productions related to black life. For sheer dramatic energy and satisfying…
In a brief prologue, a pale young woman fixes her eyes on the black void that is the past: “I’m seeing him. He’s huge. The biggest man in the world.” Fade to black. The young woman awakens to find herself on a beach. Her name is Maria, and she vaguely…
The most erotic image I have seen on the stages of Phoenix can be ogled at Playwright’s Workshop Theatre on Seventh Street. The time is the present; the place is a federal prison. The setting is a spare, clean prison cell illuminated by a single industrial lamp that hangs over…
Inspector, I confess! I love stage mysteries and thrillers. From the time, as a youngster, I saw the film classic Witness for the Prosecution–based on Agatha Christie’s play–I’ve been guilty of harboring a secret thrill for the mechanical intricacies of a spine-tingling whodunit. Phoenix Theatre has mounted one of the…
Safely ensconced in its comfortable new home in a strip mall at 99th Avenue and Peoria Avenue, Theater Works is presenting Robert Bolt’s turgid, talky historical pageant A Man for All Seasons. In its new location, the theatre has painstakingly reproduced the exact layout of the bucolic barn it previously…
When the two cast members in Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s production of David Mamet’s Oleanna start talking to each other in act one, it sounds forced. Away they chatter in the herky-jerky verbal rhythms for which Mamet is so celebrated, finishing each other’s sentences and not finishing their own, taking…
It’s doubtful that any country ever produced finer socialists than those of Great Britain–of the literary sort, at least. Perhaps because the class system is so plainly laid out on that little island, writers like Shaw and Orwell could oppose, even hate, the ruling class without failing to recognize that…
When Martin Sherman’s play Bent premiered in England in 1977, the plight of homosexuals in the Holocaust was a little-discussed episode of the century’s history. In the two decades since, the pink triangle which gays were made to wear in the concentration camps–the equivalent of the yellow star worn by…
“Nothing human disgusts me, unless it’s unkind or violent.” So remarks Hannah Jelkes, the spinster-paragon of The Night of the Iguana. She could be speaking for her creator, Tennessee Williams. That’s very likely just what Williams had in mind–reading or watching him, one always has the feeling that Williams saw…
Phoenix Theatre’s moving Arizona premiere of Miss Evers’ Boys puts achingly human faces on a truly brutal episode of American racism. The year is 1932, and a group of black men in Macon County, Alabama, is chosen for a seemingly benevolent government study on how best to treat syphilis patients…
One-act plays aren’t produced often, and that’s ironic given that the half-hour television sitcom has become America’s most popular dramatic form. That may be why the latest Black Theatre Troupe offering is so refreshing. Its current evening of oneacts provides comic and emotional extremes that would give Friends and Martin…
In August of 1991, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a car carrying Lubavitcher Jewish leader Menachem Schneerson ran into two children, killing a Guyanese-American boy. Brooklyn erupted into a race riot accompanied by an explosive public dialogue that rapidly escalated into a national debate on racism that showed a despairingly large…
Anyone who believes that ancient Greek theatre must be stuffy and boring should take in Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre’s production of Antigone. He or she will find a rare and rewarding confluence of classic and experimental theatre. Antigone is the work of Sophocles, the fifth century B.C.’s answer to Stephen…
Remember when live theatre was an event, a special occasion? Just as I was beginning to fear that those days were gone, along comes a troupe called In Mixed Company, which takes a good evening of theatre, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, and turns it into a happening. Five…
Patsy Cline remains a top-selling artist more than 30 years after her death. The 1985 biographical movie Sweet Dreams (starring Jessica Lange), recent videos about her life and music, and the release of a greatest-hits album in 1992 (it sold more than four million copies) have kept Cline a prominent…
Let’s hope you never have a houseguest like the one currently visiting Theater Works, which is presenting Larry Shue’s uproarious comedy The Nerd. This guest is a nerd in the traditional sense–taped glasses, a pocket protector, and toilet paper hanging out of high-water trousers–and is inappropriate at every opportunity. In…
With a play first performed almost 2,500 years ago, Southwest Shakespeare Company provides the opportunity to transcend the ages by bringing to life the nightmarish story Oedipus Rex. One of Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus is the well-known story of one man’s ignorant and arrogant fight against the gods. The play…
