Berkshire Review for the Arts: Theater

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The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh Directed by Garry Hynes A Co-production of the Atlantic Theater Company and Druid (Galway) Linda Gross Theater, New York, December 9, 2008 -February 1, 2009 Kate - Marie Mullen Eileen - Dearbhla Molloy JohnnyPateenMike - David Pearse Billy - Aaron Monaghan Bartley - Laurence Kinlan Helen - Kerry Condon BabbyBobby - Andrew Connolly Mammy - Patricia O'Connell Doctor - John C. Vennema
Ilya Khodosh	December 23, 2008
The 2006 Broadway production of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore remains one of the most deliriously thrilling spectacles I've ever seen, and one that I'll probably never forget. I felt plunged into an utterly amoral theatrical universe, and the grotesque violence and humor and sophisticated irony combined to generate the kind of electric bliss that I can only imagine must have been felt at the original productions of Sweeney Todd and The Threepenny Opera. Compared to Lieutenant and to McDonagh's acclaimed The Pillowman, The Cripple of Inishmaan, currently revived at the Atlantic Theater Company in a production by Galway's Druid Theatre, feels like a minor, less ambitious, tamer play by the Anglo-Irish master. Nonetheless, there is plenty to savor in the nuances and rhythms of McDonagh's hilarious dialogue, which sounds like the whimsy of J. M. Synge filtered through the savage wit of David Mamet.

Dialogue One Theatre Festival, 2008 Artistic Director Omar Sangare '62 Center for Dance and Theatre, CentreStage, Williams College Friday, November 21st 11:00 a.m. - Workshop with Obie Award winner John Clancy 7:30 p.m. - Portrait Gallery, Four Student Performances: Leungo Donald Molosi as Seretse Khama in "Seretse Khama: Blue, Black and Blue" Meredith Nelson as Britney Spears in "You Want a Piece of Me?" Andrei Baiu as Oliver in "Oliver Reed" Lexie Hunt as Sylvia Plath in "Integration" Saturday, November 22nd 2:00 p.m. - "The Event," written and directed by John Clancy, with Matt Olberg 3:30 p.m. - "A Fire as Bright as Heaven," Tim Collins 6:00 p.m. - "Male Gaze," Kymbali Craig 7:30 p.m. - Portrait Gallery 8:30 p.m. – Closing Ceremony
Michael Miller	December 19, 2008
Omar Sangare's Dialogue One Theatre Festival is one of the high points of the academic year at Williams. Dedicated to the demanding art of solo theater, it gives locals an opportunity to see some of the best professionals from around the world, as well as some exceptionally successful undergraduate efforts. Williams drama students benefit from contact with the visitors. In fact this year John Clancy, an Obie Award winner and founding director of the New York Fringe Festival, taught a workshop at the college. Now in its second year, the festival attracted visitors from out of town and filled the '62 Center's CentreStage close to capacity. It is traditional in solo theater festivals and fringe festivals to subject the performances to a committee of judges, who present awards in various categories.

The Second Annual Dialogue One Theatre Festival, 2008 Artistic Director, Omar Sangare presented by Williamstheatre at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Williams College, November 21 - 22, 2008
Michael Miller	October 24, 2008
Last December, the first Dialogue One Theatre Festival was one of the most impressive and enjoyable events offered by Williams College during the academic year. It combined some carefully selected, top-notch professionals from New York and Germany with what were certainly the finest student performances I have ever seen. Organized by Williams theater professor Omar Sangare, who has recently added to the extensive collection of awards he has garnered for True Theater Critic, a one-man play he has written, directed, and performed, the Dialogue One Festival is an event which should be of vital interest, not only to the immediate community, but to theater-lovers everywhere. Last year some members of the audience travelled from New York and Boston to attend the Festival, and this year even more visitors will be making the trip to Williamstown to see four character studies by Prof. Sangare’s students and three compelling works by professionals from St. Louis and New York. After last year’s passionate and imaginative student performances we can look forward to an exciting meeting of young actors-in-training and world of professional theater.

Black Watch by Gregory Burke Dir. John Tiffany National Theatre of Scotland St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, October 25^th, 2008.
Heidi Holder	November 13, 2008
Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, the sensation of the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival (see Lucas Miller’s review of the Scottish revival of the play from April 19th), has returned to Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse this fall after its highly successful (and all too brief) appearance last season. The current run has already been extended to December 21^st. You should hurry and get your tickets. The show is a fascinating one for U.S. audiences. While it can certainly be classified as an Iraq War play, it deals with that conflict in a manner both familiar and foreign. On one level it tells a story reminiscent of earlier war plays (and films): we get to know a group of soldiers, with its traditions, internal conflicts, motley recruits, surly but decent higher-ups. A considerable part of the action is taken up by inaction: reading mail, filling time, one-upping each other, watching American bombing runs. While no Americans appear in the play, they are very much a presence.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet Shakespeare & Company Director: Eleanor Holdridge Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, October 8^th 2008
Heidi Holder	October 24, 2008
The ghost makes a dramatically late entrance in the new touring production of Hamlet from Tina Packer’s Shakespeare & Company. The opening moments pull the audience up short. No midnight watch, no nervous “who’s there?,” no plea of “Oh speak!” from Horatio to the ominously silent ghost of the dead king. Instead, flickering and flashing lights reveal Hamlet center stage, surrounded by an electronic buzzing and fragments of lines from the play. Then the lights steady, and, bang, we are in scene two, as Hamlet’s uncle, the new king, holds forth. This opening changes the character of Hamlet; rather than emerging slowly, from the periphery of the second scene (at court, where he is a reluctant presence), the prince has our attention from the first instant. The shift is one of several bold strokes in this re-imagining of the work from director Eleanor Holdridge.

To Kill a Mockingbird Adapted by Christopher Sergel Based on the novel by Harper Lee Directed by Julianne Boyd At Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield; through October 26
Deborah Brown	October 24, 2008
The story that Harper Lee tells in To Kill a Mockingbird has been in the mind of the American public since the novel was published in the summer of 1960. It’s the fictional story of a black man wrongfully accused of rape in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1935, toward the end of Roosevelt’s first term. Tom Robinson, the accused, is being defended by Maycomb’s most respected white attorney, Atticus Finch. The character Finch is still regarded by many in the law profession as a hero and a model.

*The Seagull* by Anton Chekhov Royal Court Theatre Production at the Walter Kerr Theatre, New York a new English version by Christopher Hampton directed by Ian Rickson
Michael Miller	October 9, 2008
The interface between Chekhov’s Russian and English in its various British and American varieties is a delicate one. In the early days his plays were not easily accepted in Britain and America (for different reasons) and were perceived as distinctly alien. The coupling of British and American stage technique is more direct, but it, too, is not without its tremors and bumps. I recently heard a distinguished British actor contrast the experience of working in London and on Broadway, to the disadvantage of neither, but I found the comparison of the business-as-usual culture of London, where the theater-goer sits in the darkened hall to be private, even to hide in the theatrical experience, whereas the Broadway theater-goer, whether he has come from uptown or across the Hudson, demands full satisfaction for the not inconsiderable rent he has paid for his short-term lease on a buttocks-worth of Manhattan real estate. The current import of the Royal Court’s production of The Seagull raised intriguing questions on both issues.

Williams College theater professor, Omar Sangare, wins best performance award at the San Francisco Fringe Festival for his one-man play, True Theater Critic.
Michael Miller	September 23, 2008
Williams College theater professor, Omar Sangare, has just been awarded the “Best of the Fringe” Award for best performance at the San Francisco Fringe Festival for his one-man play, True Theater Critic. (For a video excerpt, click here.) This 50-minute monodrama has been presented in Poland, Ukraine, Great Britain, Germany, the USA, and Canada. It tells the story of an unfortunate man who suffers from an over-abundance of ambition—a person who desperately wants to be considered a so-called creator. A constant awareness of his lack of fulfilment has dominated his life, both in his private life and in his career. His private life does not actually exist, it just passes by. At the beginning the Critic cannot define his own identity. He lives in emptiness.

*Home* by David Storey Williamstown Theatre Festival, August 13-24, 2008 directed by Joseph Hardy Cast: Jack - Richard Easton Harry - Philip Goodwin Marjorie - Dana Ivey Kathleen - Roberta Maxwell Alfred - C. J. Wilson
Michael Miller	August 25, 2008
Somewhere out there, just a bit beyond the literal words and actions of David Storey’s Home, which premiered in 1970, there were clouds of topicality which have long since blown past, but Home is too good a play to become dated. It is rather a classic, like Waiting for Godot (written 1949, produced 1953) and The Caretaker (1959), which have also been offered this summer in the Berkshires—events which drove home their maturity and their staying power. Nonetheless, pre-Thatcherian Britain is an increasingly distant memory. One would have to be at least forty to recall much of it. Above all there was that feeling that opportunities were limited, but that the welfare state would look after for one at least to some probably unsatisfactory extent. There was also that feeling that British society was elderly, retired from the business of running the Empire, at leisure, pensioned off in shabby gentility, with perhaps a case of medals to reminisce over. There was that feeling of disengagement from the world of action, as one’s memory of the past became vaguer, more subject to invented distortions, and one’s interest in a briefer and briefer future evaporated. Even trade or professions, as in the play, might have a certain dream-like unreality, as profits were sucked up in taxes. In 1970, only a few years after her rebuff by France, Britain had not yet entered the European Economic Community. All this is present in David Storey’s play, even though we must understand it differently, since we no longer pick up the newspaper to read about strikes and the brain drain, and, if we read about the nationalization of failing businesses, it has a radically different character. In those days the tabloids touted stories about abused cats; today we read about the abuse of children. Like Jack and Harry, the play may seem a bit lost today, but that only adds to its charm.

Waves at the National Theatre a work devised by Katie Mitchell and the Company from the text of Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves Cast: Kate Duchêne Anastasia Hille Kristin Hutchinson Sean Jackson Stephen Kennedy Liz Kettle Paul Ready Jonah Russell
Huntley Dent	August 23, 2008
Experimental jellyfish. After reading Dickens I wanted to be Dickens, just as after reading D. H. Lawrence I wanted to be Lawrence. I can’t imagine wanting to be Virginia Woolf, however, after the total immersion of *Waves, the National Theatre’s brilliant adaptation of her experimental 1931 novel, The Waves. Like Lawrence, Woolf wanted to unseat “the old stable ego” (as Lawrence called it in a famous letter) in order to reach deeper, more realistic psychological dynamism. But what Lawrence had in mind was a liberated ego, frank in its sexual desires and evolved in its awareness. Woolf valued instability for its own sake, ego quivering on the verge of evaporating. In Waves* we meet six characters, but they operate as one conscious organism, like a trepidacious jellyfish with liquid boundaries and a desire to float above the mud.

*Private Lives* by Noël Coward Barrington Stage Company, Main Stage Directed by: Julianne Boyd Cast: Sibyl - Rebecca Brooksher Louise - Tandy Cronyn Victor - Mark H. Dold Amanda Prynne - Gretchen Egolf Elyot Chase - Christopher Innvar
Lucas Miller	August 26, 2008
Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1930), now playing at the Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, is an unmitigated treat, particularly if you’ve suffered an insufferable month of mediocre theatre as I have. The play is in itself a masterpiece and the BSC has taken it on commendably.

*Noël Coward in Two Keys* *Berkshire Theatre Festival* directed by Vivian Matalon I. "Come into the Garden, Maud" Casey Biggs - Verner Mia Dillon - Anna Mary Maureen Anderman - Princess Maud Caragnani Gian Murray Gianino - Waiter II. "A Song at Twilight" Casey Biggs - Sir Hugo Latymer Mia Dillon - Hilde, Sir Hugo’s wife Maureen Anderman - Carlotta Gray Gian Murray Gianino - Waiter
Lucas Miller	August 26, 2008
It has been a lucky season for Cowardites in the Berkshires. The Barrington Stage Company put on a wonderful production of Private Lives (1930) and now, as a perfect complement to that early work, the Berkshire Theatre Festival is now showing Noël Coward in Two Keys (1966), Coward’s last stage work. As though that weren’t a treat in itself, the production is directed by Vivian Matalon, who directed Coward in the London premiere just over forty years ago.

Not Waving by Ellen Melaver Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nikos Stage directed by Carolyn Cantor Cast Matt - Nate Corddry Lizzie - Maria Dizzia Peter- Dashiell Eaves Patsy - Harriet Harris Bo - Will Rogers Cara - Sarah Steele
Michael Miller	August 25, 2008
Gasoline prices have soared up this summer, forcing many of us to abandon plans for an idyllic holiday at the beach. But, shattered reader, do not fear, for the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Not Waving by Ellen Melaver has most obligingly brought the beach to us. In doing so, however, they have forgotten to bring much else with them. Not Waving is a play that follows six people (in three groups of two) to a public beach where a man had drowned the year before. Their conversations begin as trivial, but soon lead to touchier subjects, echoing the undulations of the waves before them, symbolic of life...

Othello by William Shakespeare Directed by Tony Simotes Shakespeare and Company, Founders’ Theatre July 18 - August 31 Cast: Elizabeth Aspenlieder - Bianca Jonathan Croy - Lodovico/Soldier Michael Hammond - Iago Merritt Janson - Desdemona LeRoy McClain - Cassio Tom Rindge - Duke of Venice/Soldier John Douglas Thompson - Othello Michael Toomey - Montano/Senator Walton Wilson - Brabantio/Soldier Ryan Winkles - Roderigo Kristin Wold - Emilia
Michael Miller	August 14, 2008
Othello stands out in an almost indefinable way among the tragedies of Shakespeare. It seems to take its entire color and fabric from the extravagant imagination, behavior, and language of its exotic hero. This conforms perfectly well to Shakespeare’s methods in Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Lear, for example, but Othello’s outlandishness (to use the original sense of the word as well as its more current metaphorical connotations) imparts his character and his language with an open-ended quality which effect us as pure color and emotivity—the famous musical quality of the play. If one plays the old reductive game in interpretation, the tragic situations of most of these heroes arise from their positions as outsiders.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts Director: Anna D. Shapiro Steppenwolf Theatre Company The Music Box Theatre, New York Cast: Jim True-Frost - Little Charles Estelle Parsons - Violet Weston Kimberly Guerrero - Johnna Monevata Robert Foxworth - Charlie Aiken Brian Kerwin - Steve Heidebrecht Michael McGuire - Beverly Weston Madeleine Martin - Jean Fordham Mariann Mayberry - Karen Weston Amy Morton - Barbara Fordham Sally Murphy - Ivy Weston Frank Wood - Bill Fordham Molly Regan - Mattie Fae Aiken Troy West - Sheriff Deon Gilbeau
Heidi Holder	August 14, 2008
Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play, August: Osage County, now runs with several new cast members. (For a review of the original cast, see Berkshire Review for the Arts, June 17^th 2008.) Gone are Deanna Dunagan, a Tony-award recipient for her portrayal of the puff-adder matriarch Violet Weston; Rondi Reed as her untrustworthy sister Mattie Fae (another Tony-winning performance); Francis Guinan as Mattie’s husband Charles and Ian Barford as their sad-sack offspring, Little Charles; and Jeff Perry as Violet’s son-in-law, an adulterous academic.

Sam Shepard (Writer and Director) *Kicking a Dead Horse* The Public Theater (in co-production with the Abbey Theatre, Dublin), New York With Elissa Piszel and Stephen Rea
Heidi Holder	August 9, 2008
In a play that summons up mythical images of America’s past, Sam Shepard relies strongly on evocations of the theatrical past – primarily but not exclusively his own. The opening image of a vast desert landscape marked by an open grave, piles of dirt, and a very large dead horse calls to mind not only Shepard’s earlier plays of the west but also Beckett’s stark landscapes and the graveyard scene from Hamlet. (The picture-perfect set is designed by Brien Vahey, who did an impressive job with the equine corpse). The allusions establish a self-consciously mythic atmosphere for the play’s sole character (well, not quite sole, but more on that below), one that is immediately undercut by his first words: “Fucking horse. Goddamn.” We will spend the play listening to the explanations, justifications, rants and fears of Hobart Struther (the fine Irish actor Stephen Rea), an art dealer from New York who has planned a “ground sojourn” in the west. Predictably, his scheme goes horribly awry. Instead of moving towards his goal he is stuck, lost and alone.

A Flea In Her Ear by Georges Feydeau at The Williamstown Theatre Festival New version by David Ives Directed by John Rando Set designer Alexander Dodge Cast: Dr. Finache - Brooks Ashmanskas Lucienne - Mia Barron Etienne - Jeremy Beck Baptiste - MacIntyre Dixon Camille Chandebise - Carson Elrod Victor Emmanuel Chandebise/ Poche - Mark Harelik Romain Tournel - Tom Hewitt Ferraillon - Tom McGowan Raymonde - Kathryn Meisle Rugby - Geoffrey Murphy Antoinette - Heidi Niedermeyer Carlos Homenidès de Histangua- David Pittu Olympe Ferraillon - Debra Jo Rupp Eugénie - Sarah Turner
Michael Miller	August 3, 2008
If this has been a strong year for the Williamstown Theatre Festival, it has been an annus mirabilis for comedy at the Festival. After this feast of several entirely different styles, Festival audiences can consider themselves connoisseurs of the art. If Beyond Therapy gave us New York 1981 and She Loves Me New York Musical 1963, as well as more contemporary vintages in The Atheist, Broke-ology, and The Understudy, we might assume that Feydeau’s A Flea in her Ear is Paris 1907. In a way, but not quite. David Ives in his version, which is still faithful enough to be called a translation and not an adaptation, has translated not only Feydeau’s text but its humor into a twenty-first century American idiom. (But so much of this depends on sight-gags that director John Rando should share some of the credit.) Never mind that Feydeau and his audience at the Théatre des Nouveautés would have found much of this humor more appropriate for the Moulin Rouge, where Le Pétomane held sway, than the Grands Boulevards—the old farce kept the audience in stitches from beginning to end. If David Ives, the quintessential Chicago Pole, has injected some of the earthy, absurdist humor of middle western middle Europe, it is only appropriate, since Feydeau was half-Polish himself, although of aristocratic origins.

Harper Regan a new play by Simon Stephens at the National Theatre Director: Marianne Elliott Cast: Duncan Woolley : Eamon Boland Alison Woolley : Susan Brown James Fortune : Brian Capron Mickey Nestor : Jack Deam Tobias Rich : Troy Glasgow Justine Ross : Jessica Harris Mahesh Aslam : Nitin Kundra Elwood Barnes : Michael Mears Sarah Regan : Jessica Raine Harper Regan : Lesley Sharp Seth Regan : Nick Sidi
Huntley Dent	August 13, 2008
No self-help, please, we’re British. I got caught in cross-cultural winds at the National Theatre last night, where a new play, Harper Regan, felt dated and overcooked by American standards. It was billed as daring fare (“one woman’s voyage of self-discovery”), a theme verging on the trite, and one had to remember that the British endemically resist therapy and self-help, endorsing the “carry on” ethos at all times. Our heroine, Harper Regan, is an office worker with a stolid, bewildered, and benumbed existence, a perfect example of the crabby dictum that the unlived life isn’t worth examining. But she can’t carry on a moment longer, and when she is fired from her job for no better reason than wanting a three-day leave to visit her dying father in hospital, Harper cuts loose in all directions.

Afterlife a new play by Michael Frayn at the National Theatre Director: Michael Blakemore Set Designer: Peter Davison Cast: Max Reinhardt - Roger Allam The Prince Archbishop - David Burke Helene Thimig - Abigail Cruttenden Rudolf 'Katie' Kommer - Peter Forbes Franz - Glyn Grain Gusti Adler - Selina Griffiths Everyman/Ensemble - Nicholas Lumley Friedrich Muller - David Schofield
Huntley Dent	August 4, 2008
Final summons. When the English theater needs a bracing dose of intellectual legerdemain, the go-to writer is either Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayne. The latter didn’t have Stoppard’s luck fresh out of the gate with Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead, but the imaginary wrangle over the atomic bomb between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen gave Frayne instant commercial cachet (it also referred quintessentially to Hamlet). His latest, quite dazzling play at the National Theatre, Afterlife, provides a similar mix of history, imagination, and a literary masterpiece, in this case the schoolroom dreadnaught, Everyman. The setting is Salzburg, where Max Reinhardt directed an acclaimed, one might say iconic production of Everyman for the summer festival in 1920 and many seasons thereafter.

Landscape and A Slight Ache by Harold Pinter at the National Theatre Director: Iqbal Khan Set, Costume and Lighting Designer: Ciaran Bagnall Cast: Jamie Beamish, Clare Higgins, Simon Russell Beale
Huntley Dent	July 29, 2008
The observer effect. After the play Betrayal, from 1981, I lost track of Harold Pinter. London productions of his plays have the zing of authentic English irony, etched menace, and pithy delivery that doesn’t come across with American accents. One could see Pinter as an actor as late as 1995 when he appeared in the West End in a revival of an earlier work, The Hothouse. Pinter is as strange and threatening on stage as on paper, although a witty anecdote circulated around that production. Supposedly his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, phoned up the management and said, “The whole run has been so successful, Harold and I were thinking that you should have the Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theater,” to which the manager replied, “Or he could just rename himself Harold Comedy.”

Under the Blue Sky written by David Eldridge directed by Anna Mackmin at the Duke of York's Theatre Cast: Francesca Annis, Lisa Dillon, Nigel Lindsay, Chris O'Dowd, Dominic Rowan and Catherine Tate
Huntley Dent	July 31, 2008
Love goes ka-boom. I read an interview with a young playwright, David Eldridge, who was asked about current conditions in the British theater. At 27 he had a precocious smash hit at the Royal Court in 2000 with Under the Blue Sky, a study in three scenes of romance and sexual frustration among secondary school teachers. The subject sounds deadly, and one can understand why five London theatres originally turned it down. The commercial West End trembles like melting marmalade when faced with serious dramatic writing, and the pay for playwrights is criminally low, to the point that talented ones scrounge for a living, even after having a hit. (I’m reminded of the improbable moment when Sam Goldwyn brought the poet-playwright Maurice Maeterlinck from Paris to Hollywood. Goldwyn’s familiarity with Maeterlinck’s masterpiece, Pelleas et Melisande, was dubious. The work to be adapted for the big screen was a strange naturalist treatise, The Life of the Bee. After reading the first draft of the script, Goldwyn rushed out of his office screaming, “My God, it’s about a bee!”)

*The Pillowman* by Martin McDonagh at the Wellfleet Harbor Actor's Theater, Julie Harris Stage Director: Jeff Zinn Set Design: Eugene Lee Cast Michal - Marc Carver Girl - Liliana Flores Ariel - David Fraioli Katurian - Adam Harrington Tupolski - Tom Patrick Stephens
Lucas Miller	August 4, 2008
For those sadistic souls who derive pleasure from pointless violence of language and action, I must recommend Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, directed by Jeff Zinn, now playing at the Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theatre (WHAT). Otherwise, it is to be avoided at all costs. The play’s protagonist, Katurian K. Katurian (Adam Harrington), is a writer in an unidentified totalitarian state – a bad choice of career. Policemen Tupolski (Tom Patrick Stephens) and Ariel (David Fraioli) bring him in for interrogation. Apparently his gruesome prose (almost all of which involves children being killed or tortured) has inspired some sick individual to act them out. If Katurian cannot prove his innocence, he and his mentally impaired brother (Marc Carver) will be executed by the day’s end.

*The Understudy* by Theresa Rebeck Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nikos Stage, July 23-August 3 Directed by Scott Ellis Designed by Alexander Dodge Jake - Bradley Cooper Roxanne - Kristen Johnston Harry - Reg Rogers
Michael Miller	August 4, 2008
After the season’s first and hopefully only disaster, it’s reassuring to find the Festival back in form in its latest Nikos Stage production, Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy—more than reassuring: it was an evening of constant amusement switching hats with hearty, cynical laughter. If the laughs are cynical, then you are correct in assuming that the play is more than mere froth. It is full of knowing jibes about work and careers, art, the relations between the sexes, and life in the theater. In fact it makes a telling companion to WTF’s season opener, Beyond Therapy, which gave us such an entertaining tour of love and life in the early 80’s—a vivid reminder that twenty-five years is a long time. In Beyond Therapy, the dilemma of Bruce, Prudence, their therapists, and friends, was confined to their private lives. They could take their jobs for granted—even though the therapists were lucky to kept theirs. In The Understudy Jake, Roxanne, and Harry don’t even have that. Harry is a gifted actor who just manages to survive as an understudy. He is so deeply afflicted with anomie, that, seven years before the action, he has jilted his fiancée, who turns out to be the aggressive, foul-mouthed stage manager who is in charge of his audition as an understudy in the Broadway production of Franz Kafka’s lost and recently rediscovered play, in which the two lead roles have been given to Hollywood action stars: enter Jake.

Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire New Century Theatre Dir. Ed Golden Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts July 22^nd 2008
Heidi Holder	July 26, 2008
David Lindsay-Abaire has something of a line in notably troubled females. At the heart of his breakthrough play Fuddy Meers is an amnesiac who awakens every day with her mind a complete blank; Wonder of the World features a runaway wife on a belated search for a self; and Kimberly Akimbo focuses on a waifish sixteen-year old girl with a rare disease that speeds the aging process (she is played by an actress in her sixties). Lindsay-Abaire has a deft hand with wacky comedies of unmoored identity, at times reminiscent of Craig Lucas and Christopher Durang. In Rabbit Hole, however, the playwright is on a different track (and a critically successful one: Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007). The emphasis on the hearts and minds of female characters remains, but the trouble that moves them – and the action of the play – is more prosaic, and less conducive to jokes. It’s the accidental death of a small child. The new production by Northampton’s New Century Theatre makes the most of the play’s strengths but can’t quite overcome its weaknesses.

Two in the West End: Free Outgoing Royal Court Theatre by Anupama Chandrasekhar Director: Indhu Rubasingham Cast: Ravi Aujila, Lolita Chakrabarti, Sacha Dhawan, Raj Ghatak, Shelley King, Manjinder Vir The Female of the Species Vaudeville Theatre by Joanna Murray-Smith Director: Roger Mitchell Cast: Eileen Atkins, Paul Chahidi, Anna Maxwell Martin, Con O'neill, Sophie Thompson, Sam Kelly
Huntley Dent	July 26, 2008
An actor’s paradise. The British style of acting is “just pretend,” as opposed to the "Method" in America, which is “feel it all.” The division may not be as strict as all that, but the two sides glare suspiciously at one another, English actors wondering what all the emotional Sturm und Drang really amounts to (does the actor playing Hamlet have to imagine his own mother in bed with his uncle?) while the American side distrusts actors who can play raving psychotics one minute and laugh over a pint of bitters at the neighbourhood pub the next, throwing off their characters as easily as an old coat. But whichever side you favor, London will never cede its place as the theatrical capital of the English-speaking world.

All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare Shakespeare & Company Founders’ Theatre June 20 - August 31 Directed by Tina Packer Cast: Nigel Gore - Lavache Elizabeth Ingram - Countess of Rossillion Jason Asprey - Bertram, Count of Rossillion Dennis Krausnick - Lafew Kristin Villanueva - Helena Kevin O’Donnell - Parolles Douglas Seldin - A Drummer Boy Timothy Douglas - King of France Peter Davenport - Amor Dumaine Alexander Sovronsky - Dumaine Soldat Ginya Ness - Reynalda/and Widow Capilet, mother of Diana Rondrell McCormick - Duke of Florence Morganne Davies - Mariana Brittany Morgan - Diana Grace Trull - Violenta Mike Allen Moreno - First Soldier Andy Talen - Second Soldier
Michael Miller	July 23, 2008
This production is so full of life and so intuitively likeable that I find it difficult to criticize anything in it. Of course its not perfect, but Tina Packer and her cast got the spirit of Shakespeare performance just right—on their own terms, and even the scratchy singing and the less assured among the actors served their purpose within the expectations of the production. To get the bad out of the way at the beginning. The fine actor Nigel Gore will be the first to admit, I hope, that he is not a Roger Daltrey. Tina Packer did not intend for him and the other actors who opened their mouths to sing to turn All’s Well That Ends Well into a rock opera—well, not quite. But Gore and some of his companions excelled at the world-weary rasp, or croak, or gasp of the life-worn child of the sixties, who has seen love and desire come and go many times over. Their fuzzy diction, the limitations of the sound system, and my ears (I’ve always been challenged by picking out the words in rock music.) also served the benevolent purpose of postponing my coming to terms with the elaborate lyrics Tina Packer has concocted from medieval troubadour songs and Shakespeare himself...but more of that later.

The Revenger's Tragedy by Thomas Middleton at the National Theatre Director: Melly Still Designers: Ti Green and Melly Still Cast: Duchess : Adjoa Andoh Ambitioso : Tom Andrews Duke : Ken Bones Spurio : Billy Carter Lussurioso : Elliot Cowan Gratiana : Barbara Flynn Supervacuo : John Heffernan Piero : Peter Hinton Vindice : Rory Kinnear
Huntley Dent	July 21, 2008
Shockeroo playhouse... I was walking past the Embankment last night when three girls ran by wearing plastic devil’s horns that lit up red in the dark. They whirled away, dancing to a nearby reggae street band. A fitting epilogue to Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, just letting out at the National Theatre. The doings onstage were pretend Satanism, too. The National exists to keep classic plays alive, but Middleton’s carnival of gore, which piles up eight bodies in the last scene alone, leaving not one named character alive, made the audience laugh – not what the playwright intended. What began as shock value turned into a bloody Feydeau farce by intermission, and the last half played like Monty Python awaiting Eric Idle to prance out with an executioner’s axe. Calling Nankipoo. The actors weren’t winking at us, but there’s only so much oozing crimson you can take.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare Hampshire Shakespeare Company Director: Chris Rohmann Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, July 19, 2008
Heidi Holder	July 23, 2008
For nearly twenty years, the Hampshire Shakespeare Company has provided theater-goers in the Pioneer Valley with their requisite summer fix of outdoor Shakespeare. Their latest offering, a fast-paced production of As You Like It, staged on the lawn (and patio, and fire escape) of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at U. Mass., shows what can be done, lean and mean, with a well-directed company and a good setting. (On other nights the show is staged at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley.) Of course, this work in particular benefits from an outdoor setting. One of Shakespeare’s “green world” comedies, As You Like It features shenanigans in the woods, with disguised lovers, amorous shepherds, exiled courtiers, and a wayward fool all crossing paths. But the play has, from the start, other, darker elements.

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov Translated by Paul Schmidt Directed by Michael Greif Williamstown Theatre Festival, July 19, 2008 Natasha - Cassie Beck Irina - Aya Cash Chebutykin - Michael Cristofer Vershinin - Stevie Ray Dallimore Masha - Rosemarie DeWitt Fedotik - Cary Donaldson Andrei - Manoel Felciano Kulygin - Jonathan Fried Olga - Jessica Hecht Solyony - Stephen Kunken Ferapont - Peter Maloney Anfisa - Roberta Maxwell Baron Tuzenbach- Keith Nobbs Rohde - Joe Tippett
Michael Miller	July 22, 2008
Life is good: two Chekhovs in one week! And the first one, Erica Schmidt’s Uncle Vanya at Bard, was so very satisfying! However, in real life just as in Chekhov’s world, the convenient fiancée gets killed, the attractive officer gets transferred, and somehow we never get to Moscow, at least in the present emergency, Michael Greif’s obnoxiously slick and clumsily executed production of Three Sisters at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. This is unfortunate, since it is the only classical play in their season, which has been impressively successful so far.

Broke-ology Williamstown Theatre Festival Nikos Stage July 9-20 Written by Nathan Louis Jackson Directed by Thomas Kail Set designer Donyale Werle Ennis - Francois Battiste Malcolm - Gaius Charles William - Wendell Pierce Sonia - April Yvette Thompson
Lucas Miller	July 17, 2008
Seldom have I witnessed such riotous laughter as at the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production Broke-ology, now enjoying its world premier under the direction of Thomas Kail. It is not only a story of economic hardship and the family problems that result from it (as the title suggests) but one which explores the importance of pursuing one’s dreams.

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov Bard Summerscape Fisher Center for the Arts, Theatre 2 July 16, continues through July 20 translated by Paul Schmidt Directed by Erica Schmidt Mark Wendland, set designer Michelle R. Phillips, costume designer David Weiner, lighting designer Cast: Peter Dinklage - Vanya Ritchie Coster - Astrov Lynn Cohen - Marina Robert Hogan - Professor Alexander Serebriakov Taylor Schilling - Yelena Mandy Siegfried - Sonya Kate Skinner - Maria Vasilyeva Robert Langdon Lloyd - Telegin (“Waffles”)
Michael Miller	July 18, 2008
The core of Erica Schmidt’s brilliant production of Uncle Vanya is in fact its shell. On the impressively broad and deep stage of the Fisher Center’s Theatre 2, set designer Mark Wendland made an enormous room with a low ceiling, which was both desolate and claustrophobic. Most of the wall space is covered with peeling wall paper decorated with an endless forest of birch trees in autumn... Erica Schmidt exploits the set’s expanse and the characters’ awkwardness, confusion, or drunkenness to introduce long pauses or to draw out a simple action to extreme length. This is not the ambiguous, multivalent pause of Harold Pinter and Jonathan Miller; it rather expresses the characters’ rooted despair and the futility of their situations.

The Year of Magical Thinking a play by Joan Didion based on her memoir directed by David Hare with Vanessa Redgrave
Huntley Dent	July 17, 2008
Death and the maiden... I avoided Joan Didion’s bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking, for two reasons. One, I practice magical thinking, which crops up among primitive tribes and schizophrenics as the belief that your thoughts can change reality. I don’t mind being in the company of schizophrenics because the greatest spiritual teachers share the same belief. How else could faith move mountains? Didion views magical thinking as akin to delusion, a desperate tactic that the mind resorts to when reason fails. If my first excuse seems eccentric, it’s backed up by an uneasy sense that Didion had done something creepy and narcissistic with grief. Now that The Year of Magical Thinking has been transformed into a one-woman show for the iconic Vanessa Redgrave, I had a chance at the National Theatre last night to prove or dispel my trepidations.

New Connections, a season of short new plays created by established writers and performed by young people. For more details, click here. High-profile writers including Mark Ravenhill, Abi Morgan, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery have written plays for this year’s festival. The search for identity pulses through New Connections 2008: for acceptance and survival in modern Britain, for racial equality in 1960s South Africa, by deception in magical allotments, during white-out in a snow blizzard, through parenting, through faith, or by comic mistakes of social networking. It Snows, by Bryony Lavery & Frantic Assem, performed by Sandbach School, Cheshire Burying Your Brother in the Pavement, by Jack Thorne, performed by RSAMD Youth Works, Glasgow 3 – 8 July Olivier, Lyttelton & Cottesloe Theatres
Huntley Dent	July 10, 2008
I hope the British never shut up. Riding across town to Oxford Circus, a harried woman got on my bus with her daughter in tow. The little girl was a constant chatterbox. Her mother (and the rest of us) suffered in silence until the following exchange occurred: Mother: Don’t you ever get bored with yourself? Little Girl: You’re mental. I tucked this away in my mental file along with the drunk who got on my bus last year and said to the driver, “I have no money. Would you accept a poem?” Precocious kids came to mind at the National Theatre last night. I bought tickets, I thought, to two experimental plays on the big Olivier stage, but the music booming before the curtain went up was Euro techno hip hop, and the mostly young audience started performing The Wave (as fans do at Wembley and the Super Bowl). I discovered that I was at a festival of youth theatre companies, finalists who won the right to strut their stuff at the National after competing in fifteen regional semi-finals. The temptation was to bolt for the outdoors, but the first play, It Snows, turned out to be a musical slash happening of jaw-dropping skill.

*Fat Pig* at the Trafalgar Studios, London Written and directed by Neil LaBute with Kris Marshall, Joanna Page, Ella Smith, Robert Webb
Huntley Dent	July 11, 2008
“A man’s a man for a’ that.” Few careers have begun as aptly as Neil Labute’s. First noticed for a cruelly ironic indie film, “In the Company of Men,” he has remained true to its theme of men who cannot love taking it out on women who try to love them. The slug line for the movie still brings chills of revulsion: “Two business executives--one an avowed misogynist, the other emotionally wounded by his girlfriend--set out to exact revenge on the female gender by seeking out the most innocent, uncorrupted girl they can find and ruining her life.” The fact that the girl happens to be deaf went so over the top that someone should have sniffed out Labute’s Swiftian slyness. Few did. Feminist nerves were rubbed raw, and in all the commotion his name was made.

Two of a Kind: Ronan Noone’s The Atheist and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole Now at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village; reviewed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival Directed by Justin Waldman, with Campbell Scott/ DVD Criterion Collection
Lucas Miller	July 7, 2008
It is hardly surprising that Justin Waldman’s production of Ronan Noone’s The Atheist is already being hailed as the best play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival so early in the season. In form, it is a dramatic monologue. The audience listens to the stereotypically amoral and inconsiderate American journalist Augustine Early talk about his rise to disreputable fame, after tainting the lives of so many (though, ironically, he seems to have an unfortunate case of the Midas Touch, making his victims more famous than himself).

TR Warszawa: Macbeth 2008 Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, Susan Feldman, artistic director; in association with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. At the Tobacco Warehouse, Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, Dumbo, Brooklyn. Performed in Polish with English supertitles. Adapted from William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna; sets and costumes by Stephanie Nelson and Agnieszka Zawadowska; music by Abel Korzeniowski, Jacek Grudzien and Piotr Dominski; lighting by Jacqueline Sobiszewski; video design by Bartek Macias; special effects designed by Waldo Warshaw. Cast: Cezary Kosinski - Macbeth Aleksandra Konieczna - Lady Macbeth Tomasz Tyndyk - Banquo Michal Zurawski - Macduff Danuta Stenka - Hecate Miroslaw Zbrojewicz - Duncan Jacek Poniedzalek - Lenox Jan Dravnel - Seyton
Michael Miller	July 9, 2008
In preparing this review—more in that than in actually witnessing the performance—I had to remind myself that this is not the play which has come down to us as Shakespeare’s Scottish Play with some conspicuous additions by Thomas Middleton, as well as some other cuts and adjustments. It is rather Macbeth 2008, Gzregorz Jarzyna’s adaptation of the play. What made this hard was that it resembled Shakespeare’s play in so many ways that I couldn’t help thinking about it and making comparisons. Jarzyna’s spectacle even includes several excerpts from the best-known speeches in the play, inserted into the crude, obscenity-ridden dialogue that Jarzyna has created in the style of contemporary Hollywood film, especially the work of his hero, Ridley Scott. If I had been able to attend the lecture Jarzyna gave at the Polish Cultural Center about a month before the much-publicized opening of his show, I’d have been better prepared, and perhaps more resistant to comparisons with the Jacobean play, so admirably presented by a company from the Chichester Festival barely a mile distant from its venue in the armpit of the Brooklyn Bridge. All Mr. Jarzyna’a lights, noise, and bodily fluids amounted to pretty feeble stuff in comparison with the all-too-familiar words of the old play. His purpose is to present the story of Macbeth as a nightmare, as if the play were not nightmarish enough in itself.

That Face at the Duke of York's Theatre by Polly Stenham Director: Jeremy Herrin Design: Mike Britton with Lindsay Duncan, Hannah Murray, Matt Smith, Catherine Steadman, Julian Wadham
Huntley Dent	July 5, 2008
Tube riders litter the train with newspapers, which other riders pick up to alleviate their boredom. Coming home last night I saw a grisly headline on one of these throwaways, “Sixth Stab Murder in Week of Death.” In London? The first sentence of the story was horrifying. “A schoolboy has been stabbed to death with a foot-long knife by a gang of thugs in south London.” It was within memory that a single shooting death made national news. Compared to America, the UK is still a kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb. Verbal and psychological violence are another matter.

Relocated at the Royal Court Theatre written and directed by Anthony Neilson with Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Stuart McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson, and Nicola Walker
Huntley Dent	July 7, 2008
Clouds over Sloane Square, and the posh and spicy girls known as Sloane Rangers weren’t tramping around with a slew of shopping bags over their arms. Or not that I could see two days ago. A wag has renamed them the trustafarians, which seems to be sticking. I had a drink with a new friend named Warwick and told him that he and I were the only two people in the bar named after castles. “Presumably,” he said. We had met while waiting to troop into the tiny, dark, primitively ventilated Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre to be assaulted by Relocated, a stage provocation that has divided the critics while scaring off the public.

Rowing to America, A Play
Kitty Chen	July 4, 2008
*Scene 1: The stage is bare. The sky is midnight blue, with a crescent moon and a few stars, the sound of waves slapping the side of a boat. GIRL sits on a box or bench, rowing with oars. She is weary. SISTER is in shadow. In GIRL’s first speech, SISTER may speak some of the lines simultaneously or alone. GIRL* I'm rowing to America. The only thing I brought with me is a picture of a smile. Here in my head. Strong and radiant like the sun. The smile of my sister. "When we grow up and go to America, everything will be all right," she would say to me. She told me all sorts of things about America. Have you heard them too? She said the streets are paved with gold lamé. A dollar a day keeps the doctor away. Apple pie and huckleberry finn for breakfast. Milk and honey flow down the avenue Fifth Avenue. A chicken in every pot-pie. Where the sun never stops shining, and spacious skies are blue, and amber grains are always waving at you. . . When we get there, we will wave back. Look, Sister—they have come to greet us! Hello! Hello! We are here—we have come to America!

Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm Almeida Theatre, Islington July 4,2008 Paul Hilton - Johannes Rosmer Helen McCrory - Rebecca West Paul Moriarty - Ulrik Brendel Veronica Quilligan - Mrs Helseth Malcolm Sinclair - Doctor Kroll Peter Sullivan - Peder Mortensgaard
Huntley Dent	July 4, 2008
Far from celebrating our independence day, the British are probably trying to forget America and the whole era when Tony Blair was Bush’s poodle. After a miserably cold, damp spring, there was a national scare over strawberries – specifically, that the crop would go moldy and rot in the fields. Strawberries and cream are de rigeur for finals at Wimbledon. Now it’s finals weekend and the berries came through. But there’s a smell of black mold seeping out under the doors of the tiny Almeida Theatre in Islington. Ibsen is afoot, and the fate of souls is being tossed around on stage like a medicine ball. A very heavy medicine ball.

George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara National Theatre, London Director: Nicholas Hytner Snobby Price : Paul Anderson Charles Lomax : Tom Andrews Barbara Undershaft : Hayley Atwell Bill Walker : Ian Burfield Jenny Hill : Katharine Burford Bilton : Martin Chamberlain
Huntley Dent	July 1, 2008
The long nights are already on the wane, but one leaves the theatre with a glow on the horizon, and a newspaper can be read outdoors well after nine o’clock. Fresh off the plane (i.e., as grungy as five-day-old socks) I tried not to go groggy at the National Theatre’s production of Shaw’s Major Barbara. Putting on a play by Shaw is like sticking your head out of a foxhole to see who shoots. Nobody could be more fusty and out of favour (perhaps the two Barries, James and Philip), but the London critics were mostly happy and none were snarky.

George Bernard Shaw, Candida Berkshire Theatre Festival, June 30, 2008 Anders Cato, director Jayne Atkinson - Candida Michel Gill - the Reverend James Morell David Schramm - Mr. Burgess Finn Wittrock - Eugene Marchbanks Samantha Soule - Proserpine Garnett. Jeremiah Wiggins - the Reverend Alexander Mill
Michael Miller	July 1, 2008