Tag Archives | plays

Speakeasy on Race

Did I say The Whistler would be on Court Street, and the tickets $10?  Oh la!  My partners on the ground have found a better space literally around the corner at 815 Race Street. It wasn’t a Prohibition beerhall but you gotta love the name “Speakeasy on Race.” We’ll have less work to do to […]

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Auditions for The Whistler

Director Tim Waldrip and our colleague Carol Brammer of the Clifton Performance Theatre in Cincinnati begin auditions next week. I’ve been thinking about the delicate chemistry among roles–how the actor you choose for the male lead and the actor you choose for the female lead must play off each other, either amplifying or cancelling each […]

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WWI

One wedding and a funeral

The best of this year’s “second stage” series at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC has been Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, directed by Joshua Benjamin. Massicotte is either a Canadian claiming to live in New York or a New Yorker claiming to come from Canada, but he is at any rate well known in Alberta, […]

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silence

Silent stage

Just ran across an interview with playwright Annie Baker (Body Awareness, Circle Mirrror Transformation) in the Boston Globe. Regarding her precise stage directions for awkward silences she notes: “I’m interested in silence because I think it’s a huge unacknowledged part of our daily lives…And by silence I don’t mean portentous, Pinter-esque silence — although that […]

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Quarto edition

Once More into the Trapeze, Dear Friends

Staging technologies can be integrated so as to seem, if not inevitable, at least natural. I think of the 2004 Danish movie Strings, performed by marionettes, as a particularly moving example.  Well, last weekend I got to see Henry V (on Trapeze) at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC. To say that nothing really prepared […]

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flyer

I’ve Seen a Ghost (writer)

Michael Hollinger’s play Ghost-Writer, receiving its regional premier at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, surely had some great tech behind it last night, including especially Matthew Callahan’s sound design. Everything was a little bit of perfect, deliberate and deliberative, yet finally I left feeling unsatisfied. (more…)

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