Tom Williams Fifty Words – an exercise in hurt-your-spouse relationship dynamics. The show is a scream-and-holler affair that moves from being sensual seduction to brutal verbal and physical love making that moves into hurtful physicality. It depicts the deep seeded resentments that a marriage can encounter when the bond that unites two people is shallow.
Charles Smith’s riveting examination of how memory can lead to totally different explanations of past events that get tainted over time mainly due to how we process such memories. Smith’s work dramatizes how unreliable personal memories can effect public history. It is 1980 and 50 years have passed since the lynching in Marion, Indiana.
The setting is a clock and watch repair shop on Chicago’s North Shore (terrific set designed by Simon Lashford). A middle aged man – Jimmy (Thomas Gebbia) is busy repairing clocks and watches. His daughter Dale (Cathlyn Melvin) – a moody 17 year old announces she is not going to college. She thinks she has little time left on earth. Does she know about mortal clocks – which are physical watches everyone has implanted behind the heart that can tell us precisely the time of our deaths?
When Jennifer Barclay’s 75 minute drama ended it felt so incomplete that I wondered if the producers forgot the second act? Freedom, NY is a vague allegory about trust, tolerance and the lasting effects of violence on a small American town. The play uses black/Latino race relations to tell its cautionary tale of small town prejudice.
Now in its USA premiere at Stage 773, Calderon’s 1635 powerful work as been hailed as a masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age. The work reminds me of Shakespeare with its rich, lyrical, almost poetic language and its universal themes of social justice, the use of power and ambition verses personal gain.
The story focuses on the destruction of Hazel (Paul S. Holmquest) and his brother Fiver’s (Scott T. Barsotti)’s birthplace warren that necessitates them to lead a band of misfit rabbit survivors toward a new safe home. This quest turns into an adventure filled with terror, insurmountable dangers, strange alliances that is brisk and entertaining.
The film diva, Liv, is in a medical induced coma to prevent further injury. Kemp is a frustrated poor nurse desperate to make both money and gain self-respect, devises a plan to fulfill is needs. When he realizes that a spiritual bestseller (Lattes With God) sold 12 million copies and that his girl’s daughter Leah claims to see angels, he concocts a plan to create another spiritual book…
As the tension rises and the emotions erupt, the party devolves into a painfully raucous night of revelations as several family members struggle to reckon with the accusations. The play manically moves between celebration and pathos, from exploding repressed emotions to acknowledgment of long held secrets.
According to co-producer Mat Churchill, “Total theater means an immersion into a variety of staging techniques, from traditional to the heretofore unseen.” That was present in threesixty production’s amazingly thrilling production of Peter Pan. This show will blow you away with its inventive story telling and eye-popping video that complimented and enhanced the visual experience of flying over London in 1904.
I never thought I’d ever say that I liked the later, more sanitized versions of Grease much more than this revival! ATC’s 2011 production was simply too long and too unfocused as it contained a vastly inferior score than the later Broadway stage productions and the film. I believe, at 2 hours 45 minutes, the show is 45 too long