Category Archives: Theatre
Taylor Mac: master of audiences
We fell in love with Taylor Mac’s tragic sense of humor, ribaldry, and affection at this year’s Spoleto. So did everyone else, it seems, after the cross-dressing performance artist left town. His virtuosic command of the audience, his assurance on stage, his ability to provoke and coddle and swing your emotions. The man, so to […]
This year’s innovations in theater
One more bit of reflection before we go. This time on theater. I have talked at length about my favorite show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. And I have plumbed (some of) the depths (briefly) of Bamuthi Joseph’s incredible hip-hop play, the break/s. Others in need of discussion are The Cody Rivers […]
Knowing where the buck stops
Ellen Moryl called me yesterday. She’s the director of the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, which puts on Piccolo Spoleto. She’d read my post about the fiasco of Wayang Modern, Geoffrey Cormier’s shadow puppet show that looks like it would be good for kids but is in fact really not for kids as all. Her […]
For the time being
I saw PURE Theatre’s Cloud Tectonics last night and realized for the first time that it’s a play about time. Rather, it’s about the mystery of time: that unseen force in the universe, that elusive fourth dimension.
Sharon Graci plays Celestina del Sol, a pregnant women who has somehow stepped out of time’s continuum. Clocks stop […]
Go see The Great War
I saw it last night and it’s an astounding piece of puppet theater. I’m sorry I haven’t written about it. I promise to later. For now, though, please consider my heartfelt endorsement. It’s a fresh and new way of looking at reality and experiencing something as unreal and hard to understand as World War I.
Here […]
Shadow puppets gone very wrong
I got a call from a City Paper staffer Wednesday night about Wayang Modern, the shadow puppet theater performance led by Geoffrey Cormier. It took place at the New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church on Elizabeth Street.
There were many parents, children, and elderly people in attendance, who, it’s safe to say, were expecting to see a […]
My black family and Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s
I never thought the one-drop rule affected me personally until I read David Matthews‘ memoir, Ace of Spades.
The one-drop rule is a phenomenon of American slavery. It determined who was black and who was not. In brief: If you have as little as one drop of “black blood” in your ancestry, you were considered black. […]
Feeling The Great War
The Great War
Wednesday marks the opening of yet another innovative theater company using video to enhance their artistic vernacular. The group is called Hotel Modern. It will perform a theater piece called The Great War. The group does something they call “live-animation performance” in which they create an entire miniature world, in this case the […]
We have Obama now
Tonight is your last chance to see The Burial at Thebes, a play based on Sophocles‘ Antigone translated by Irish poet Seamus Heaney. It’s an ingenious production with minimal set design — just a bare stage with a round lattice-work background that serves as an entrance and exit point. The Greek chorus wears large linen […]
Monkeying around
On Friday afternoon, I found a members of the Dalian Circus Company, the fabulous troupe of acrobats, jugglers, and contortionists featured in Monkey: Journey to the West, having a smoke behind the Sottile Theatre. One of the tech guys, an American, was with them and he was teaching them the classic game of showmanship and […]
