Theater of War Productions is one of the most exciting companies in the performance of ancient Greek and Shakespearean plays because they tie each performance to a particular social issue and use the performances as a jumping off point for discussions of the issue. Their recent version of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis was performed …
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Sorting It Out, by Matteo Esposito—12 Apr. 2020
As I said in my review of Moonchild, Matteo Esposito had contacted me about watching and reviewing his plays. A reading of Sorting It Out is available from the Online Play Reading Group at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8fEDk32mh4. Like Moonchild, Esposito’s Sorting It Out is a piece of disability theatre, but I think this play is more thematically …
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Moonchild, by Matteo Esposito—12 Feb. 2022
I watched the video of a reading of Matteo Esposito’s Moonchild (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FNkpDJ3ZV0) because Matteo had emailed me asking for a review of the play. Moonchild is a piece of disability theatre, focused specifically on the challenges faced by Harry, a boy with autism who wants to be a painter. The conflict facing Harry …
Sonnetfest ’21: 4th Annual Shakespeare on the Bluff Festival—23 July 2021
Sonnetfest ’21, directed by Kevin Wetmore, introduced Shakespeare’s sonnets as fourteen-line plays, and that promise was borne out. The performance consists of several sonnets read (not in numerical order) and acted out by Loyola Marymount University’s College of Communications and Fine Arts. I watched the final performance, which was streamed over YouTube-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsHyQUA0hK0 (this link …
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Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, by Moises Kaufman-2 May 2021
There are few subjects more fit for the stage than Oscar Wilde. He was a larger than life personality, who fundamentally changed the way many think about art, about society, and about sexuality. And of course he was best known in his lifetime as a playwright, so the stage is doubly appropriate. Moises Kaufman’s Gross …
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Antigone in Ferguson, by Theater of War Productions–9 Aug. 2020
Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson adapts the Sophocles play in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and its specific history in Ferguson, MO following the murder of Michael Brown by police in 2014. Organized and run by members of the Ferguson community working with professional actors and singers from New York and …
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The Persians, by Aeschylus, 25 July 2020
Aeschylus’ The Persians is one of the oldest and most interesting plays in Western history, being unique among surviving ancient Athenian plays in being set entirely outside the Greek speaking world, and in unique among tragedies in being about current events rather than a mythological subject. The play premiered in 472 BCE, just eight years …
Angels in America, Part One: Millenium Approaches, by Tony Kushner, 3 Mar. 2020
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is one of the most culturally significant pieces of gay theatre in history. Set during the AIDS crisis of the mid- to late-1980s, the play explores issues of gay identity, disease, economic/political privilege, race and ethnicity, and religion, all set within an apocalyptic and messianic framework. The Penn State theatre …
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Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare–2 Nov. 2019
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is, perhaps surprisingly for people who don’t know the play, not really about Caesar, it’s about Brutus and his struggle with the decision to be drawn into the conspiracy to murder the increasingly imperial Caesar in the hopes of restoring a free Roman Republic. And then once the murder is committed, he …
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Dial “M” for Murder, by Frederick Knott–6 Sept. 2019
*For full disclosure, I worked as the dramaturg for this production.* Frederick Knott’s Dial “M” for Murder is a noir mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, a murder plot which hinges on a tiny clue that leads to the unraveling of an almost perfect crime. It has had many lives—as a BBC television production, …
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Phillip Zapkin 