Author: Tom Williams

I can also tip my hat to Citadel’s current leading man, Tim Walsh, who thoroughly embodies all of the timing, rubber face expressions and comedic zeal of a seasoned burlesque Top Banana. Walsh has a tall order of keeping all of the plot machinations with its myriad of courtesans, soldiers, eunuchs, lovers, letches and company spinning within his control, and it is a heroic effort.

Ross’s retellings of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are a lot more similar to the fan-work genre today known as “The Abridged Series.” He comments more about the absurdities of the story, and drops in a lot more humorous references to the prequels, but also makes a greater effort to capture the emotional heart of the trilogy. Ross also throws in references to the memes and other bits of fan activity that have emerged since he created this show, prior to the rise of the internet or Episodes II and III, but these moments seldom overwhelm the basic point of telling the story.

A new season for Eclipse Theatre means a new playwright to be spotlighted for a year, and Stephen Adly Guirgis is just the one to demonstrate theatre’s continuing relevance and vitality. From The Last Days of Judas Iscariot to The Motherfucker with the Hat, the New York-based Guirgis often wrestles with themes of responsibility, guilt, and justice in plays with a Christian framework and colorful language employed by a diverse array of urban characters. So, too, is the case with his early work, Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, which starts Eclipse’s season with an emotionally piercing production directed by Anish Jethmalani.

Even Longer & Father Away is a fantastical quest of tropes in search of a cliché: the angry, young man gone native—accompanied by his comedic confidant, his young-but-mature sister, and her happy-go-lucky boyfriend—quests stubbornly for what he thinks he needs, but instead encounters a wise, mystical woman on a mountaintop whose perfectly felicitous stories lead him exactly to what he always really needed.