Tom Williams

Certainly, the intimacy of the Raven Theatre provides wonderful immediacy. The audience becomes completely involved with the dispossessed Joad family, economic victims of the Great Depression, thrust from their homes in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and forced to board their makeshift truck to undertake a hard, tedious migration across the U.S.

The History Boys covers the life of eight English boys prepping for their entrance exams designed to get them into Oxford or Cambridge. But playwright Alan Bennett has a much larger agenda than merely a coming of age story or a debate about the purpose and style of education. He tackles issues such as sexual identity, teen angst and the role of teachers as mentors to their students.

Steppenwolf Theatre’s series for Young Adults mounts terrific theatre—period! Under the tight, flowing direction of Michael Patrick Thornton, Of Mice and Men left the high school students in the audience in tears. They strongly emphasize with both George and Lenny. Of Mice and Men is a compelling and unsentimental tale of friendship and loneliness.

The Revenants focuses on two married couples barricaded in a basement during a violent uprising of the undead. We never learn too many details except that a zombie bite makes a human into a zombie

This is a marvelous piece of dramatic theatre! Rogers is a talented writer who both develops rich characters and plausible situations placing each in a nuanced complexly gray-shaded world on Rwanda in the 1994.

Their Treasure Island is a major triumph with a grand future offering sophisticated tale ripe with pirates, excitement, buried treasure, ships and distant shores peopled with richly developed characters originally created by Robert Louis Stevenson.