Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece Mother Courage and Her Children is one of the great examples of Brecht’s epic theatre style, and the Juniata College production (directed by Chris Staley) put Brechtian alienation techniques at center stage. In its rather rough self-consciousness, the performance would almost certainly make Brecht proud. The play tells the story of a …
Continue reading Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht–28 Apr. 2019
Mad Cow Theatre’s production of Top Girls was the first Caryl Churchill play I’ve seen other than Cloud Nine, which I’ve seen twice. While Churchill is an amazingly influential playwright, in the US, Cloud Nine is almost certainly her most performed play (not without good reason) so it was great to see another of her …
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is one of his oddest plays. It’s essentially divided between two halves, the one set in the court of Sicily and the other in the pastoral idyll of Bohemia. The first half is a psychological portrait of paranoia, violence, and oppressive patriarchy, and the second half blends rustic charm with redemptive …
Continue reading The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare–27 Mar. 2019
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 is one of my favorite plays. It’s deep and complex, but also problematic (for reasons which will be explained more below). The first half is set in roughly 1880 in British colonial Africa. The act centers on Clive and his family, including his young son Edward (played by a female actor), …
The set of The Love List Norm Foster’s The Love List is a funny play about desire, perfection, and finding that special someone. Nittany Theatre at the Barn’s production, directed by Laura Ann Saxe, was an enjoyable show, though it sometimes lacked polish. The play opens with Bill—a single statistician in his 50s—and Leon—his unfaithfully …
I had never been particularly interested in Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, because for whatever reason I always thought it was a musical, and I just wasn’t feeling it. But the Nittany Theatre at the Barn production, directed by Frank Wilson, has definitely changed my mind. The show is funny, it deals with so …
Few modern plays are more widely known, read, or performed than Oscar Wilde’s comedic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest. Premiering in 1895, I believe it was the most performed comedy of the 20th century. Given that repute, it is a daunting task to adapt the play, as Sterling Sax did for Nittany Theatre at …
Despite Neil Simon’s popularity and reputation, this was actually the first time I had seen (or encountered) a Simon play, and I can definitely appreciate why people enjoy his works so much. Rumors is a hilarious show about a set of upper class New Yorkers trying to protect their friend from a scandal they themselves …
The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project is an amazing, gut wrenching play. It is documentary theatre, built around the murder of Matthew Shephard in 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming. Matt was a university of Wyoming student who was brutally beaten by two locals and left tied to a fence post in …
When going to see a theatre production at a college theatre you’ve never been to before, you never know what you’re going to get. College theatre is of notoriously varied quality. Which is why I was so pleased with Juniata College’s production of Antigone, directed by Leigh Hendrix. While there were some performance limitations, the …
Phillip Zapkin 