Chronicling Charles Darwin’s discoveries was nicely and effectively presented due to Gmitter’s fluid writing upon Collette Pollard’s suggestive set. Director Jessica Thebus’ staging underscores the ambitious storytelling effectively. The combination of telling Charles’ amazing rise to fame as the most controversial writer of the 19th Century and his lifelong romance made for an engaging play.
Lay Me Down Softly is essentially a memory play centered around the patchwork family of Roadshow. The action and metaphors are sports references and the on-going boxing matches. We see how hope and dreams were stiffed as this group laments through melancholy their lost dreams. Each character depends on the Roadshow family for sustenance, companionship, and recognition.
Emma lives in a world of tea parties, gossip and social snobbery. Emma proves to be a disastrous matchmaker and only her confident (and secret admirer) Mr. Knightley (Ben Muller) will tell her the blunt truth. Filled with clever romantic twists, nice period music and dance, nicely choreographed in period authentic English dances by Mady Newfield and Tammy Ravitts Bretscher, Emma has the potential to be a worthy comedy of manners but a critical element mars the production.
Eddie Carbone , a longshoreman, is overly protective and desirous of his 17 year old live-in nice Catherine (Ayssette Munoz). Eddie runs this Sicilian family in the old school manner—as a dictator. His wife Beatrice (Sandra Marquez) tries to council Catherine to follow her heart as she persuades Eddie to let her grow up by taking an office job
In their year of one playwright – 2014 – Lynn Nottage, Eclipse Theatre Company, under the creative direction of Aaron Todd Douglas, have mounted a powerful and wonderfully performed version of Ruined, the finest play by the talented Lynn Nottage.
She dramatizing the atrocities committed against women in the long civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nottage puts her immense research and writing skills to work to create situations and characters aptly depicting the conflicts in East Africa from a women’s perspective.
BoHo Theatre and Oracle Productions
Top Nominees
In Non-Equity Jeff Awards 41st Season
Their latest work is a madcap screwball comedy by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar who wrote Liliom that was adapted into Carousel the musical. The President (1930) finds the hands-on control freak President Norrison, played with manic aplomb by John Arthur Lewis (doing the finest work of his career here). Norrison is getting ready for a holiday when his ward, Lydia (Michelle M. Oliver) announces that she is pregnant and married to a poor Communist taxi driver named Tony Foot (Travis Delgado)
Set in the teacher’s lounge, the four teachers deal with a broken copier, a bureaucracy with minimal assets for the teachers and a survival, often cynical, morale of the veteran teachers. This dark comedy focusing on the adjustment of a new teacher conflicted by her determination to helping her students learn with the conflicting system and the advise from her fellow teachers.
The work, in its Midwest Premiere, is a dysfunctional family saga that deals with a bullied over weight teenage girl, a cold hearted mother, a father obsessed with global warming and a drifter nephew turned teen mentor.
Edgar and Alice have played their love/hate game for their entire almost 25 year marriage. We never really understand if they truly love on another to if all the animosity between them comes from hate or simply a sophisticated game to keep life interesting for both of these bored folks? As the games escalate, Edgar passes out several time as he apparently is having strokes or is he? Edgar is sickly and dying, or is he? Alice schemes to destroy and/or leave Edgar since she has been suffering his nastiness for too long, or is she?