When the girl-next store pretty blond, Samantha (Simone Roos) arrives from Reno to become the fourth dealer, she has a soothing effect on all the characters. After a meeting, the ‘Aces’ agree to each get to know the new dealer with an eye on trying to determine of she’ll go along and join their scam.
Read MoreFifty 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.
Read MoreCharles 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.
Read MoreComedy is rife as he and Alan Schmuckler, (as investigating Officer Marcus Moscowicz) thrust and parry their way to a solution of the crime. And to add to all this, both men are excellent pianists, exchanging and interweaving their musical skill as they swiftly replace each other at the keyboard to underline narrative and interlace songs and dialogue
Read MoreJim Manganello has set himself quite the task: adapt Leo Tolstoy’s epic War & Peace into an hour-long piece of dance-theater. On the face, it seems almost comical, absurd. But with theater like this, it forces one to strip everything but the essentials away, and we are left with a very raw, very real piece of theater, that somehow, through it all, remains true to the original text.
Read MoreThe 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?
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreNow 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.
Read MoreBuilding on the wonderful world of a play within a play, Stage Kiss takes the audience behind the scenes with as much surprise and fun as Noises Off. There are the actors (two of whom were lovers 20 years ago), there are the characters they play (two of whom were lovers 20 years ago), and then – in additional layers — there is the impact of the role on the one who must perform it.
Read MoreThe 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.
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