“Grimm” is a variety show—a themed collage of commissioned one-acts. Contributors include Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel from which the musical “Wicked” was adapted; Marcus Gardley a young multiple award-winning poet-playwright from the west coast; Melinda Lopez, whose “Sonia Flew” one every award Boston bestows upon playwrights, and past Company One contributors: Lydia Diamond, author of “The Bluest Eye” as well as the Huntington’s recent success, “Stick Fly,” John Kutz, the ubiquitous actor and writer whose recent Company One credits include “After School Special” and the Super Heroine Monologues;” John Oluwole ADEekoje, who’s most recent Company One mounted plays were “The Overwhelming” and “Six Rounds Six Lessons;” and Kristen Greenidge the Company One playwright-in-residence whose most recently staged work was “The Gibson Girl.”

“Grimm” showcases these stars as much as possible. Each gets a chance to introduce his or her play via recording, further author’s notes are available in the program, and complete “Grimm” scripts are available for sale in the lobby. While much of the fun comes in seeing how different, how characteristic and how unique each adaptation is, the evening is really sold by a ceaselessly energetic and inventive ensemble cast comprised of Company One members Mason Sand and Mark Vanderzee, a collection of non-resident company favorites and a couple of young newcomers from the Boston area. The actors double (or triple) up on roles, slipping comfortably into each varied style and mining each script for it maximum of comedy and drama. Much credit is due here to directors of alternating shorts, Summer L. Williams and Shawn LaCount.

It’s got to be said that in terms of writing, these mini one-acts turn out to be pretty uneven. Greenidge’s play, which adapts an the obscure tale “Clever Else” into a dark comedy about a trio of local moms, locked in a passive aggressive feud as they wait for their daughters to come out of ballet practice, is the most ambitious and well realized. You know these people, and the play’s actors prove that they really know these people, yet as mundane lower-class suburbanites, these women are characters we rarely see on stage. Kuntz’s take on the much-explored “Little Red Riding Hood” offers a very differently daring look at sex roles which keeps you squirming and guessing.

Then there’s Diamond’s overly self-referential reading of a Grimm’s tale with racist and sexist overtones through a lens of political correctness, by actors with think volumes in their laps, and the tales of Gardley and ADEkoje, which are goofy and often hilarious, but ultimately feel a bit more frivolous.

That said, the night’s got a lot going for it. You know these are good stories. You know they’ve got memorable characters. They’ve followed you since you were a child. It’s fun and its’ stimulating to meet them as adults. Especially when they get modern sensibilities to match your own.

Cherry Smoke

Company: Gurentt Theatre Project

Genre: New Drama

Dates: July 9-24

Venue:

Boston Playwrights Theater
949 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston, 02215

(866) 811-4111

Grimm

by John ADEkoje, Lydia R. Diamond, Marcus Gardley, Kristen Greenidge, John Kuntz, Melinda Lopez

Company: Company One

Genre: New Drama

Dates: July 16-August 10

Venue:

Roberts Studio Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street

Boston, MA 02116

(617) 426-5000

Othello

by William Shakespeare

Company: Commonwealth Shakespeare Company

Genre: Classical Tragedy

Dates: July 22-August 15

Venue:

Boston Common

617-426-0863

CAMBRIDGE

Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant

by The Avantguardists

Genre: Experimental Dinner Theater

Dates: July 11, 18, 21 and August 1

Venue:

Club Oberon

2 Arrow Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

(617) 496-8004

The Hound of the Baskervilles

by Stephen Canny & John Nicholson

Company: Central Square Theatre

Genre: Mystery

Dates: July 22-August 22

Venue:

Central Square Theatre

450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

(617) 576-9278

To send corrections or request a listing, contact our Theater Editor at jwrabin@gmail.com

This exciting venture will be programmed by Robert Orchard, Emerson’s new Executive Director of the Arts, a founding member of the A.R.T. who spent 30 years as a managing director and then executive director for the avant garde company in residence at Harvard.

Said Orchard in a statement: “We’ve grouped these artists into two programming streams: legends and pioneers. Legends are established, highly-regarded companies and artists whose work is celebrated around the world, such as The Abbey Theatre, The New York Theatre Workshop, Peter Brook, Tectonic Theater Project and F. Murray Abraham, among others. Pioneers include a new generation of artists whose ideas are redefining theatre, such as Elevator Repair Service, 7 Fingers, Rude Mechs and Basil Twist. We will also host a wide variety of performances for people of all ages. Some of these works will be developed at the Paramount Center for Boston audiences and travel the world.”

ArtsEmerson will be housed at the Majestic Theater, and at the newly revamped Paramount Center, a beautiful Art Deco-style former movie house at Downtown Crossing, which now sports a 590-seat theater with an orchestra pit, a 150-seat black box, and a cinema, the Bright Family Screening Room. It also features a new, scene shop, rehearsal studios, a soundstage and nearby apartments for resident artists.

In contrast to the often prohibitively expensive Broadway in Boston series housed in the other glamorous venues in the area, ArtsEmerson is selling season tickets to it’s first season for just $60, with tickets to one show thrown in for free. The season covers a broad range of ground from new comedy, to documentary drama, from the investigative cabaret of The Civilians, to the literary explorations of Elevator Repair Service (who brought us Gatz at the A.R.T.). There will be an Irish Festival, featuring the celebrated Abbey and Druid theater companies. The great Peter Brook will mount some Boston premiers of his work. F. Murray Abraham will take on Shylock courtesy of Theater for a New Audience.

As Orchard said, “It’s an exciting time to be a theater fan in Boston.”

For their recently announced initiative, “One City, One Story,” 30,000 copies of a short story by an established local author will be bound into booklets and circulated throughout Boston. In the weeks before the second annual Festival, to be held in Copley Square on October 16, copies of the featured 5,000- to 8,000-word story will be available for free at the Boston Public Library, in subway stations and at other public locations, as well as on the Festival Web site.

Says Boston Book Festival Executive Director Emily D’Amour Pardo in a press release, the booklet will be “beautiful, lightweight, and easy to carry, and the online version will be available to anyone who wants it.”

The initiative was inspired by the Brooklyn-based One Story literary magazine, which mails one short story to subscribers every three weeks. According to One Story’s Web site, the booklet format “allows readers to experience each story as a stand-alone work of art and a simple form of entertainment” and is “designed to fit into your purse or pocket, and into your life.”

Says Boston Book Festival Founding President, Deborah Z Porter, “stories were requested from almost two dozen established authors who have ties to New England,” and the final selection committee, made up of “a designee from the Mayor’s office, several branch librarians, several Boston Book Festival Board members and one or two other representatives of the community,” will pick the winner from the best four or five manuscripts. The featured writer, whose name will be announced later this summer, will make multiple local appearances in the weeks prior to Festival and will lead a talk at the event. It’s a great opportunity for the writer, but the real focus of “One City, One story” is to get readers talking to each other.

“We love the idea of many thousands of people in Boston reading the same story and talking about it against the backdrop of the Boston Book Festival,” explains Porter. “Boston has a passion for reading. We want to explore this further by uniting the city around a single story and examining it from the many different perspectives that exist here.”

Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino shares her vision. “’One City, One Story’ is a wonderful idea for engaging many people in the joy of reading for pleasure and a great way to start a citywide conversation about a work of fiction,” he said.

At a time when library branches are closing around the city, obituaries for the book are being written every other week and media is increasingly tailor-made for “niche markets,” it will worth seeing if, just for a couple of weeks, the Boston Book Festival can get us all on the same page.

Jason Rabin of the Blast staff contributed to this report

Patricia Smith’s voice reverberates through the narrow, dimly lit room in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe, a charming French restaurant in Greenwich Village that tonight is transformed into a hub of poetry. The evening begins with an open mic reading in which a series of poets deliver works varying in caliber and style. Whispers and the clanking of silverware can occasionally be heard throughout the room. But when Smith takes the stage, the audience is captivated, sucked into the vortex of her poetry, drawn in by the power of her words and performance. “Can you teach me to write a poem about my mother? / I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead, / can you teach me to remember my mama? / A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole / has admitted that her mother is gone.”

Smith begins every reading with these verses about how poetry helped 6th grader Nicole process her mother’s death. Tonight is no exception, even though she considered devoting her brief 20-minute reading exclusively to newer pieces. She doesn’t feel grounded if she opens with another work because this poem is her manifesto; it is a bold declaration of what poetry can do for others and, of course, what it has done for her.

As the winner of the most prestigious awards in the spoken and written word, Smith has also done a lot for poetry. In her early career, she was crowned the National Poetry Slam champion four times, and her spoken word roots continue to be evident in her heartfelt poetry readings. Later, she garnered the coveted Pushcart Prize for the best literature published by small publishing houses, the very first Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the poetry category, a National Poetry Series award, and a National Book Award nomination.

But for Smith, poetry is not an esoteric pastime to be used as a backstage pass into elite inner circles. She believes in the profound power of language, and she shares her poems because she knows there are people like Nicole who are waiting to hear them, who need to find a way to come to terms with something intensely personal. “You will always find at least one person in every audience who is there for a reason,” Smith says. “And it might be a line that’s inconsequential in a poem of yours that will get them to sit up and go, ‘You know, I’ve felt that way; I just didn’t know there was a way to express it.’” In this moment of connection between speaker and listener, these audience members realize “they have a second throat that they’re not using,” Smith says. “Poetry is a responsibility and not just an art…You are responsible for how your words are going to reach other people…You need to know that they will have an effect.”

This audience connection is so important to Smith that she makes a point to present her new poems to live audiences as soon as possible. The audience’s response and emotional tenor guide her revision process. For example, audiences often have very strong reactions to selections from Blood Dazzler, her book of poems about Hurricane Katrina. She explains, “If I see somebody who’s a little jumpy when I’m doing the [Blood Dazzler] poems, I think, ‘That might be someone from New Orleans; that might be somebody with something to teach me.’ So you can never put a period at the end of the last line of a poem and think, ‘That’s it; I’ve got it; I’ve done it.’ It’s got to be a conversation.” The interchange between audience and poet doesn’t even need to include words. “You can actually feel whether or not a poem is working,” Smith says.

Smith’s dynamic relationship with her audiences is one of the reasons her poetry appeals to such a wide array of people. She has shared her work everywhere from hole-in-the-wall Chicago bars and a train platform in Berlin to Carnegie Hall and Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival. People from every walk of life—age, race, class, sexual orientation, educational background—gather together to hear her and possibly discover the words they’ve been waiting for.

The Birth of Slam Poetry

The first audience Smith captivated with her poetry was a community of spoken word poets from her hometown of Chicago. Their brand of poetry was imbued with the sound and the fury of language, and they loved the feel of well-crafted, rhythmic words in their mouths. The excitement of their performances escalated when they instituted poetic duels known as poetry slams. In these competitions, a handful of poets deliver poems of three minutes or less. Audience members are selected to judge the poems and eliminate about half the poets each round. After three rounds, the last poet standing is the winner. The amateur judging process means that audience connection is the lifeblood of slam poetry.

As a journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times in the 1980s, Smith discovered slam poetry when she reported on the city’s first Turf Poetry Festival, little knowing that she was destined to become a defining figure of the movement. She gave her first performance during an open mic night at the Green Mill, the cocktail lounge that hosts the famous Uptown Poetry Slam. Her thrilling performances and moving narrative poems quickly won her the respect and admiration of Chicago’s slam community.

In the beginning days of slam, Smith says, “we had no idea, really, what was going on. It just felt really good and a social circle was building up around it. We were all very nurturing and supportive.” The poets thought carefully about each others’ work and offered suggestions for perfecting a phrase or rearranging lines for maximum impact. But, says Smith, “it wasn’t just poetry that connected us…We know each other on a deeper level than just, ‘Hi, what’s your sign?’ If there’s something bugging me, I’m more likely to turn to a member of that community than I am to my own family, just because they know more about me in a deeper way. I’ve said things in poems that I haven’t said to a lot of people.”

One member of this close-knit artistic group, Michael Brown, eventually became her husband. The pair of sizzling slammers moved to Boston in 1990 and brought the spoken word revolution with them. Initially, Boston was wary of the unpredictability and competitiveness of slam. “Chicago was pretty much ready to try anything,” remembers Smith. “When I came to Boston, it was like backtracking…We just had to change our expectations and get people excited about things we were already doing.”

Smith and Brown initially introduced slam at the Stone Soup poetry reading, which was then meeting at T. T. the Bear’s Place in Central Square. However, “the staunch Stone Soup readers…didn’t trust where the performance was going,” says Smith. They had spent a long time gathering an audience of traditional poetry readers and weren’t prepared for what Smith calls the “crapshoot” of slam performances. She acknowledges that some slam performers “continue to be clowns year after year because they think that they’ve learned what poetry is and how to push buttons.” For these performers, the slam is all about finagling laughter, groans, and applause during their three minutes in the limelight. Many of the highly educated Stone Soup crowd were appalled by these types of poets and consequently believed that slam poetry had very little of the linguistic value found in conventional, printed poems.

However, plenty of slam poets—including Smith—were just as entranced by the written word as any Stone Soup writer. Their performances were so thrilling precisely because they had spent hours laboring over their poems, granting life to their beautiful creations through the birth pangs of thoughtful writing, editing, and preparation. One of Smith’s greatest contributions to slam poetry was that her well-crafted verse legitimized the movement in the minds of the literati who were open enough to listen. Her words cut through the “page versus stage” debate and demonstrated that good poetry can succeed in both arenas.

Though the Stone Soup readers rejected slam poetry, Smith knew she could find some Bostonians who would share her passion for it. And she was right: Boston eventually became one of the first cities to adopt slam outside of its Chicago birthplace. When she and Brown moved the slam to a bookstore called the BookCellar, large crowds began to flock to the competitions. In fact, there were so many people crowded on the stairs inside and trying to listen from outside that, for the first time in Boston, poetry became a safety hazard. Slam soon found a permanent home at the Cantab Lounge and, a few years later, spread to the Lizard Lounge as well. “The slam—if you give it air—will work exactly the way it’s supposed to work,” Smith says. Fanned into flame by the frigid air of Boston, slam soon became a national phenomenon.

At the forefront of this exploding movement, Smith was quite a rising star herself. She won the individual title at the very first National Poetry Slam championship in 1990, and she went on to reclaim her crown three more times in 1991, 1993 and 1995. One of the pieces she performed in the 1996 championship, “Undertaker,” was turned into a five-minute independent film that won awards at the Sundance and San Francisco Film Festivals. She also appeared in the documentary Slamnation, which chronicled the 1996 championship. In this film, many competing poets spoke of Smith with a mixture of reverence and fear, all agreeing that she could be the downfall of their respective slam teams. She was not just the most successful slammer to date; she had become a legend.

Burning the Landscape

While Smith’s career as a slam poet was taking off, her day job was writing columns for the Boston Globe. She had almost as many fans of her journalism as of her poetry. No matter which genre she employed, Smith painted the full humanity of her subjects, and her readers were touched by these authentic portraits.

In 1998, Smith’s incisive stories earned her a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. And that’s when the ugly truth came out: Smith had fabricated sources and quotes in some of her columns for the Globe, violating the first rule of journalism ethics. One of the most notorious made-up sources was a cancer patient whom Smith claimed went by her middle name, Claire. The centerpiece of a column about a new cancer treatment, Claire is portrayed as a formerly optimistic person turned somewhat morbid and gruff by what she calls “the ogre” of cancer. In Smith’s farewell column, she said that she had fabricated characters like Claire “to create the desired impact or slam home a salient point.”

But while her journalist’s voice and eye often enriched her poems, her poet’s imagination never should have entered the fact-filled world of reporting.

To her credit, Smith admits that her actions cannot be justified by her lack of time, by her drive to succeed or by her desire to produce a shining column every week. She wrote that these hollow excuses “point to the cursed fallibility of human beings, our tendency to spit in the face of common sense.” Some of Smith’s colleagues and readers relished the downfall of a heroine while others felt betrayed, disillusioned and disappointed. But many recognized that despite her ability to stir readers’ thoughts and emotions, Smith was only a human being, just like those she wrote about so poignantly.

Smith’s life quickly spiraled downhill. She lost her job at the Globe, as well as her American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and Pulitzer nomination. At the same time, both her health and her marriage fell apart.

But like an arsonist phoenix rising from the ashes of her own making, Smith refused to let these events defeat her. Not knowing where else to go, Smith returned to Chicago and to her last remaining source of strength—slam poetry. She gave what many consider the most memorable performance of her life at the Chicago Cultural Center in front of the community she had always been real with, the one group that would not turn aside because of her professional sin and her personal despair. To thunderous applause and a standing ovation, Smith laid bare her soul.

Almost a dozen years later, Smith says people still remark on that reading. The audience had initially gathered out of curiosity, wondering what Smith would say after suffering through public demonization and private hell. As her words washed over them, they were deeply moved by the gritty emotion, heartache and triumph. These were words they had been waiting for, words that suggested hope and redemption against all odds.

While Smith says that “it was very important for me to be in that place at that time,” it wasn’t until the National Poetry Slam, which took place a few months later in Austin, Texas, that she fully recognized how this group of people could be her saving grace. “That’s when I realized that the poetry community is a really unwavering community,” she says. “They had kind of pulled me out [of my depression] because I wasn’t talking to anybody. They really just closed ranks, and that was very, very helpful for me.”

The poetry community was the lone encouraging voice in the cacophony of opinions about what the Globe incident would mean for Smith and for her career. Smith recalls people asking her what she would do with her life now that she could no longer write. “The world [was] telling me who I was supposed to be,” she recalls. “It’s like, nudge nudge, hint hint hint. And you don’t take the hint, so the easiest thing to do is to burn the whole landscape clean and start over.”

Fortunately, when Smith burned the landscape of the journalism career she had built for over two decades, she was not bereft of all avenues for writing. In fact, these events allowed her to focus all her energy on writing and sharing poetry, which she says is “exactly what I should have been doing all along. I’m finding great rewards in it. It’s giving me some personal movement; it’s giving me a way to translate my own life without looking to outside people to legitimize me.” While the loyalty of the slam community was immensely helpful for Smith, it was pure, unadulterated poetry that enabled her to find strength in herself. She says, “It was a real revelation to realize that I could find solace in poetry when I needed it, that not only was there a community that I could turn to, but that whenever I’m searching for answers, I feel like I have the power to find them myself and that’s in the writing.” It’s not always an audience member who needs to hear a poem; sometimes a poem contains the words the author herself needs most.

Smith’s missteps at the Globe actually helped her to stumble onto the path toward becoming the writer she is today. She says, “I’m not thrilled with how I got there, but to tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t change anything.”

Reluctant Hosannas

The many naysayers who thought Smith’s writing career had screeched to a permanent halt clearly did not have their fingers on the pulse of poetry. Before the events at the Globe, she had already published three books of poems, and her work had appeared in literary journals such as The Paris Review and TriQuarterly. But the applause from critics grew increasingly louder as she continued to pour her heart into her poetry. Teahouse of the Almighty, the first book of poetry she published in over a decade, became a 2005 National Poetry Series winner, and Blood Dazzler was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

But regardless of the censure or praise her work receives, Smith will always find in poetry a source of personal strength. It’s not about concrete achievements—putting a period at the end of a line, winning a slam or racking up poetry awards. Rather, it is an important exploration, a process, a journey. As Smith says, “It’s not reaching a goal that matters; it’s [the process of] getting to the goal…When you reach what you think is the goal, you look up and say, ‘Well, damned if there’s not more road there.’” This is a road a poet must walk for herself. According to Smith, “Poetry becomes the way you move your own life forward.”

Nevertheless, poetry is also about others. In her poetic manifesto dedicated to 6th grader Nicole, Smith proclaims the weighty responsibility poets have: “Angry, jubilant, weeping poets— / we are all / saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight.” While finding her own answers through writing, Smith’s words also help people process emotions they thought were too deep and complex to express. Her poems lend a voice to those who are often overlooked or forgotten and plumb the varied human experiences that tragic news headlines cannot fully communicate.

In the low lights of the Cornelia Street Cafe, dozens of people listen closely to the forgotten voices buried beneath the torrents of Hurricane Katrina’s flood. Smith introduces “34,” the first poem she wrote for Blood Dazzler: “The story [about Katrina] that pushed at me the most was the story of the 34 nursing home residents who were left behind to die. So what I tried to do is turn the clock back just a few seconds and give each one of those 34 people just a minute of their voice back.”

After the reading, Jackie Sheeler, webmaster of poetz.com and one of the hosts of the Cornelia Street reading, stops by Smith’s table to tell her privately how much she loves the book: “I normally don’t just sit and read a book of poems that isn’t an anthology because it’s too much of just one voice. But I couldn’t put Blood Dazzler down because it’s filled with voices.” The book is replete with the nuanced voices of victims and villains alike, tracing the common thread of humanity that binds us all together despite our differences.

In the midst of her literary success, Smith’s goal remains the same as when she first started out as a slam poet: she writes so that both she and her audience can heal and connect, remember and understand. Words have the power to change lives; in different ways, they saved both Smith and Nicole. Fully convinced of poetry’s profound purpose, Smith concludes her poetic manifesto with an exhortation to her fellow writers: “So poets, / as we pick up our pens, / as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones— / remember Nicole. / She knows that we are here now, / and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. / And she is waiting. / And she / is / waiting. / And she waits.”

June 2010

BOSTON

38th Annual Playwrights’ Platform Festival of New Plays

Company: Playwright’s Platform

Genre: New One-Acts

Dates: June 10-17

Venue:

Boston Playwrights’ Theater

949 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
(866) 811-4111

The T Plays

Company: Mill 6 Collaborative

Genre: New Drama

Dates: June 23-27

Venue:

The Factory Theater
791 Tremont Street

Boston, MA 02118

(617)-240-6317

Timon of Athens

by William Shakespeare

Company: Actors’ Shakespeare Project

Genre: Drama

Dates: May 20-June 5

Venue:

Midway Studios
15 Channel Center Street
Fort Point Channel

Boston, MA 02210-1038

(866)-811-4111

M² (Molière Squared)

by Molière

Company: Imaginary Beasts

Genre: Comedy

Dates: Through June 12

Venue:

Plaza Black Box

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street

Boston, MA 02116

(617) 933-8600

Prelude to A Kiss

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: Through June 13

Venue:

B.U. Theatre

264 Huntington Avenue

Boston MA 02115

(617) 933-8600

Summer Play Festival

Company: Boston Actors Theater

Genre: New Drama

Dates: June 23-27

Venue:

Boston Playwrights Theater
949 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston, 02215

(866) 811-4111

CAMBRIDGE

Johnny Baseball

by Richard Dresser and William Reale

Company: American Repertory Theater

Genre: Musical

Dates: Through June 27

Venue:

Roberts Studio Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street
South End, Boston, MA

(617) 426-5000

The Lady with All the Answers

by David Rambo

Company: Nora Theater Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through June 22

Venue:

Central Square Theater

450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 576-9278

JAMAICA PLAIN

The Pillowman

by Martin McDonagh

Company: Footlight Club

Genre: Contemporary Drama

Dates: Through June 12

Venue:

Elliot Hall

7A Elliot Street

Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

617-524-3200

WATERTOWN

Sophie Tucker: Last of the Red Hot Mama

by Richard Hopkins, Jack Fournier and Kathy Halenda

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: Musical

Dates: June 24-July 11

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

321 Arsenal Street

Watertown, MA 02472

(617) 923-8487

To send corrections or request a listing, contact our Theater Editor at jwrabin@gmail.com

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His intensely emotional realism and dramatic use of lighting had a formative influence on the Baroque school of painting.

Neither the cursed artist not the atheist, this is a new Caravaggio, differing greatly from the stereotypes, a man of profound spirituality and one of art’s greatest innovators, who emerges from the documentary investigations of the National Committee for the celebrations of the fourth centenary of his death, which will be made public in exhibitions, conferences and publications throughout 2010.The anniversary of the fourth centenary provides an opportunity for redefining through highly scientific initiatives the Maestro’s real human and artistic profile and for providing moments of in-depth analysis and reflection on his extraordinary pictorial production. Thanks to the flourishing of studies, Merisi’s biography had largely been reconstructed, although the stereotypes formulated overtime often run the risk of reducing his complex personality to the easy and inappropriate image of a “cursed artist” (a description borrowed from the end of 19th century “cursed poets”).

The objective of the many events, is not to make known Caravaggio, perhaps the most appreciated artist in history, but rather to better investigate his work. Recent studies have in fact provided a significant increase in the number of sources, and diagnostic testing on his paintings are revealing unknown and fundamental details of the techniques he used. This includes the manner in which he used drawing in a number of paintings, of which, for example, there are a number of traces in the “Boy with a Fruit Basket.”

If you like American musicals and like the pageantry, ritual and mythology of Red Sox fandom, you will love this. If you like the Sox stuff but don’t like musicals, you’re going to have a good time too, as long as you brace yourself a little, and keep an open mind.

I say this as a redeemed, post-apocalyptic Sox fan who reached the height of obsessive zealotry during the ’03-’04 season, who also loves theater, but has, let me be clear, a very low threshold for the American musical as a genre. I can’t get into the campy conventions, and generally, I don’t enjoy the style of music on offer. I faced both obstacles head-on in the audience of Johnny Baseball. If it weren’t of and for New England it’d be Broadway all the way.

In a nutshell though, this one works because it’s funny, and because, yes: they did their baseball homework. My guess is that the creators, designers and performers put in some serious time studying crowd reaction shots from that infamous, curse-breaking miracle series against the Yanks in ’04. They had the looks, the postures, the outfits, the rhythms and the attitudes of the suffering faithful down to a satirical tee.

Why adapt an already theatrical live event into a stage show—and in this form? Because this is undeniably the defining myth of New England. Because it has staggering parallels to the Greek tragedy—a sin committed nearly a century ago seems to displease the fickle Gods, plaguing a nation for generations, until a band of scrappy heroes comes together from far away lands to take collective action, reverse the curse and defeat the enemies keeping them down–but Greek as it is, it deserves an American form of expression. And finally, because there’s simply more to unpack about the strange experience of investing in the Red Sox for a lifetime, than can ever be explored on WEEI.

Funny and campy as it is, “Johnny Baseball” does not shy away from some of the darker elements of Red Sox history. In fact, it argues that the real sin and curse originate not with the management error of selling the Babe to the hated Yankees, but in the much worse one of being the last team in Major League Baseball to racially integrate.

The play’s central story follows fictional pitcher, Johnny O’Brien (Colin Donnell), a Worcester native and hurler savant, raised by nuns and plucked from obscurity to pitch in The Bigs. An instant baseball success and New England saint, Johnny’s downfall is his love for Daisy Wyatt (Stephanie Umoh), an African-American blues singer introduced to O’Brien by none other than the Babe himself,  who is played as a charismatic, gravelly-voiced degenerate by the very funny, Burke Moses.

When the racist Red Sox management conspires to sunder the couple, citing fears that the Boston fans won’t be able to handle their hero’s taboo romance, O’Brien gets so messed up mentally that he loses his celebrated “stuff.”

While the evil plot ruins his career, it also inspires him years later to integrate the team he has wound up couching back in Worcester, and to push for his new African-American star pitcher, Tim (Charl Brown), to be the first to integrate the Sox, an achievement he imagines could redeem him, his ball club and its fans.

“Johnny Baseball’s” greatest strength is its depiction of these fans, from the hoity-toities of the gilded age who believe that God has blessed their team, to the hilarious Worcester Booster cheerleader-leading squad, to the sulky bleacher-bums of ’04.

There’s plenty to quibble with about this show. There’s the often-uninspired songs (I would have been happier with “Tessie,” “Sweet Caroline,” “Shipping off to Boston,” and “Dirty Water”) the melodrama, the baseball details it doesn’t get right, and the conspicuous avoidance of a truly important factor of any Red Sox story: the strange mixture of loathing, terror, and often, bitter envy toward the New York Yankees that motivates every aspect of fandom. Plus, some of you, I’m warning you, are not going to appreciate the accents.

It’s imperfect as a work of art to say the least, but in spite of it all, it’s still wicked fun. You can (and should) bring sausages and beer into the theater, and you should be sure to wear your colors—even if you sport a pink hat, or a blue one with a rigid brim.

“Johnny Baseball,” written by Richard Dresser (book) and Willie Reale, (lyrics) with music by Robert Reale, directed by Diane Paulus, plays at the A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center through June 27.

Timon cut 5 from Angelica Brisk on Vimeo.

But it’s true. The strange apocryphal genre-bender, thought by many to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and contemporary, Thomas Middleton, turns out to be well worth saving.

A fable about the evils of being a borrower or a lender, “Timon” is as timely as can be, and is mounted with boundless energy by Director/Scenic Designer/Composer, Bill Barclay, and a dynamite ensemble. Led by new artistic director, Allyn Burrows in the title role, the cast features A.S.P. regulars Bobbie Steinbach, John Kuntz and Steven Barkhimer along with first-rate guests, Daniel Berger-Jones, Joel Colodner, Michelle Dowd, and most notably, Will Lyman in an unforgettable turn as  Apemantus, a misanthropic old philosopher with one foot in the court and the other in the wilderness.

“Timon” returns the company to Midway Studios at Fort Point Channel, an industrial-feeling art space tucked away between South Station and the waterfront. Barclay takes his design concept from the ambiance of the space, setting up camp in front of a flimsy facade decked out with a cubist painting, which looms behind a single sandbox-like patch of earth—a piece which serves variously as rustic decoration, sauna, and naked patch of forest.

Artists, senators and creditors bustle about in paint-splattered white coveralls and they wheel around and scurry up and down giant metal stepladders. We’re in the world of arts and fashion, and have the feeling that everything could be papered over or pulled down and replaced at a moment’s notice.

At the head of the scene is everybody’s favorite meal ticket, Timon, an Athenian lord and proud patron of the arts. Timon delights in throwing feasts replete with lavish party-favors for all of the notables of the day, including dashing young army captain, Alcibiades (Daniel Berger-Jones), and even eminent kill-joy philosopher, Apemantus, who’s sole reason for living seems to be keeping his host in check with criticisms and barbs.

Timon thinks nothing of handing out pricey baubles to his dinner guests because, he tells us, his real treasures are his friends, whom he knows owe him everything. So confident is Timon that his connections and social standing make him invinsible, he ignores the warnings of his faithful steward, Flavius (Bobbie Steinbach), that he is spending far beyond his means.

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. When Timon learns this, he goes a bit mad, renouncing his throne and fleeing to the woods to try his own hand at the Apemantus role of ascetic misanthrope. If he is done with humanity however, they are not done with him. There’s a war on against Athens led by Timon’s old friend Alcibiades who has been angered and ostracized by a draconian senate, and what’s more, there’s a rumor going around that the fallen Timon is actually sitting on a hoarded fortune. Senator, friend or thief, no man who brings a suit to this changed Timon, will leave unscathed.

Nor can we, a modern American audience who has spent the last several years watching our legendary coffers empty, our debt rack up and our friends eye us wearily with hands still outstretched.

Fortunately, scathed though we may be, we can’t help but laugh along the way of this heightened dream vision, replete with physical comedy and poetry in almost equal parts.

Actor’s Shakespeare Project’s “Timon of Athens” runs at Midway Studios, Fort Point Channel, through June 13.

Because your first decent into erotic besottment is an admixture of souped-up hormones and delusion. You respond to something in your mate that you can’t tangibly define, and in an attempt to do so, you spin their actions like wet clay on a potter’s wheel into a persona, a mask that they seem to be wearing whenever you’re around them.

What you need is a morning after. And a morning after that, to meet the face behind the mask. You need to meet that stranger. If you’re not in love with the stranger, you have two options. You can cut your losses and run, or you go on a quest to discover how real that first face was and where and why it might be hiding.

In Prelude to a Kiss, the romantic comedy-fairly tale, currently on stage at the Huntington, this journey is undertaken by an urban office monkey named Peter (Brian Sgambati), who finds himself in strange, supernatural circumstances that heighten and highlight the romantic quandary we all face.

While Sgambati as Peter never quite seems to fall the under a the proper spell, the rest of this play—its supporting cast, the elegant scenic design by Scott Bradley, and lighting design by Japhy Weidman, the words and whimsical story by esteemed B.U. alum, Craig Lucas, and staging by Huntington artistic director, Peter DuBois—may well still manage to enchant you.

Peter’s got a tough job in this play. Almost instantly and through endearing bluster, he must win the affections of Rita (Cassie Beck), a fearful neurotic with enough beauty and endearing quirk of her own to make her a prize. More than that, he must constantly step in and out of the play’s reality to deliver soliloquies to the audience, reflecting on the play’s action as a thing of the past.

It’s not easy to be distant and knowing with the audience, while remaining active and vulnerable in the plot. As Peter, Sgamboti actually seems a little bit too comfortable in his own skin for the task. Whether speaking to us, wooing Rita in the bar where she works, grappling with the seeming doppelganger that shows up for their honeymoon, pleading with her conservative parents for an audience, or confronting the strange old man (the excellent Macintyre Dixon) who kisses his new bride just before the transformation occurs, Sgamboti speaks with the modulated aplomb of a game show host.

Nevertheless, the mysteries of just what has happened to Rita, what the old man wants, and what will become of them both, set against beautiful scenery which seamlessly swoops in and out of the background is enough to invest in for an evening which could make for an excellent date, with plenty to discuss at the restaurant after the curtain.

And yes, if the title, Prelude to A Kiss, sounds familiar, you may be recalling, as well as the Duke Ellington standard from which it is taken, the 1992 film adaption of the play starring Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan.

While this Boston debut lacks the star power and the budget of a Hollywood film, neither necessarily supersede the power of live story telling, ever the more powerful for a fairy tale.

Prelude to A Kiss runs through June 13 at the B.U Theatre.

Finally, Boston has been blessed with some Banksy of its own. On a wall adjacent an Essex Street parking lot at the border of Chinatown in downtown Boston and on another Essex Street over the Charles in Cambridge on the side of a Super Cuts building, graffiti has surfaced that is widely believed to be the work of the ever-elusive guerrilla artist himself.

The works resemble traditional Banksy pieces in terms of style, satire, and social commentary, but no one can ever really be sure what’s authentic and what’s imitation. However, most of the people I talked to today seemed convinced that these were legitimate. And I am on board with the believers. Even if they really are the work of the anonymous artist, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was the one who actually put them up; it’s well known that Banksy has a team and isn’t solely responsible for everything that goes up in his name. Still, I’d like to think the illustrious Banksy, himself, was crawling the streets of Boston at ungodly hours, hooded with cans in hand, searching for the perfect places to play his pranks.

This Boston resident is happy that Banksy has left his mark here, but we’ll have to wait and see how other citizens respond—namely the owners of the buildings he tagged. I will say, though, that when I went to both sites today, there were small crowds at each taking pictures and discussing the work; build on Banksy buzz, build on.

To read more about Banksy, check out this issue’s feature, “Banksy: A Postmodern Pioneer.”

For photo licensing rights e-mail newsroom@blastmagazine.com

Walking around the three-room exhibition, you would probably over look this work. It is an all white installation, on the floor of an unfinished room, with a low level audio track playing. Escape the warehouse wasteland of hot dogs and bulk bling and absorb this cool contemplative landscape.

The installation, Hover, by Teresa Diehl is made of three inch figurines of humans and animals standing around a mini mountain. The sound of a helicopter comes in and out making it impossible not to think of Vietnam. Spotlights cast long shows of the mound against the wall, highlighting the details in the figures. You realize they are women carrying baby sheep, the fragile, and including the landscape the whole work is made of the same destructible material, glycerin, or soap.

This work resonates- you can flip through our chapters of vulnerability- war and natural disasters, and the piece still speaks to the present. The mind flashes to Haiti, the land of undrinkable water, sick soil, and poverty.

The longer you spend in the room, the long shadows, low audio, and white sculpture, you realize what is missing from the piece is the hysteria. There is no frenzy. The figurines are not pushing to the top like one would expect, there is just a natural force swirling them up were we naturally seem to want to go. The work is a beautiful and subtle mediation on impermanence, loss, the human condition and the repetition of time.

Guerra de la Paz, the collaborative team of Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz, the other artists showing in the exhibition, like always, do not disappoint with their meticulously woven, playful sculptures commenting on contemporary culture. The colorful pieces provide a nice contrast to the ghost white work of Teresa Diehl. As you leave exhibition, take note of the irony of Guerra de la Paz exhibiting in the heart of Miami’s Fashion District.

Center for a Visual Communication
Beyond the Daily Life: Guerra de la Paz and Teresa Diehl
541 NW 27th St. (Next door at the Project Space)
Tuesday through Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday: Noon to 5 p.m.
http://www.visual.org/index.html
The show is up until the space gets rented

You may have heard of Banksy as a subversive street artist, a vandal, an existencilist or a revolutionary, but I like to think of him as a pioneer of the postmodern project. Of a similar nature to the movement itself, the graffiti artist is seemingly unidentifiable and always becoming in response to the now.

Termed a guerilla artist, his distinctive brand of satirical street art can be found all over the world in socio-politically significant places like post-Katrina New Orleans, the wall dividing Israel and Palestine, and the happiest place on earth, Disneyland. And he doesn’t restrict himself to solely exterior venues. There are videos of him subverting his work in several prominent museums, and his art has shown up in the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, along with London’s Tate Britain Gallery and the British Museum. His combination of pop, prank, art, and accessibility has led to renown on an international scale.

Although a rising force in the art world and somewhat of a pop phenomenon, the illustrious and intriguing Banksy chooses to keep his identity a mystery to the masses, making his increasingly popular persona mostly a product of perspective. There is no public figure with which to associate the images, and in this sense, he exists largely as representation. How pomo of him, right?

What is often referred to (by those snobby Modern-era enthusiasts) as low form, or even anti-form art, graffiti is Banksy’s chosen medium for many, seemingly obvious, reasons. The process, which is often championed over the product from a postmodern perspective, complements his anti-establishment message perfectly—its being illegal and all. Embracing irony and surviving on an anarchic, law-breaking process, he’s stretching the boundaries of genre and form while appearing to disregard them all together. He talks about the issue of form in his book, “Wall and Piece:”

Despite what they say graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.

A wall has always been the best place to publish your work.

Banksy’s art is living among us in our streets speaking boldly and defiantly to the masses, to the passerbys, to the everyday man. There is no singular original housed inside some museum that we must pay to view, but rather copies externally posited and exposed to the same forces of nature as we. The pieces are participating in the real right alongside us.

In his book, “Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall,” Banksy writes:

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren’t listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they’re having a piss.

His mass-produced pieces set out to affect the people—to make them notice the flaws of their society, the irony in their virtues, and the hypocrisy in their policies. To do this, the art must live amongst the people it is trying to reach and interact with them. It is a palimpsest; it can be written over. It’s impermanent, susceptible to change and destruction (usually carried out by peons of the system that it’s speaking out against). The work participates in the real in order to engage in conversation with it, to see what that real will do to it. Immanent in the elusive entity comprised of the name Banksy and the works associated with it is a vital vein of the postmodern movement. And in true pomo fashion, that vein is ever-evolving and still manages to shock those that follow it.

The latest shock came in the form of Banksy’s new film billed “The world’s first street art disaster movie.” Serving to amplify the Banksy buzz, the documentary Exit through the Gift Shop showed up rather surprisingly on the Sundance schedule in March. Despite the film’s absence within the fest’s catalog and its late addition to the lineup, Banksy fans lined up outside the 446-seat Library Center Theatre in the below-freezing weather hours before the 8:30 PM screening hoping they would catch a glimpse of this, the premiere American showing of the film rightly rumored to actually feature (albeit as a hooded, shadowy figure using a voice synthesizer) the man of mystery himself. The audience—including the likes of Adrian Grenier, Jared Leto and Danny Masterson—was prepped by the reading of a message from the film’s creator who, curiously, couldn’t be there to address the crowd himself:

Ladies and gentlemen…and publicists: Trying to make a movie which truly conveys the raw thrill and expressive power of art is very difficult, so we haven’t bothered. Instead, this is simply an everyday tale of life, longing, and mindless vandalism. Everything you are about to see is true, especially the bits where we all lie. Thanks for coming. Please don’t give away the ending on Twitter. And please, don’t try copying any of this stuff at home. Wait until you get to work.

The documentary, narrated by Rhys Ifans (Hugh Grant’s quirky roommate in Notting Hill), at the start seems to be a documentary of street art featuring some of its most prominent practitioners, but quickly evolves into what the LA Times rightly called “a sly satire of celebrity, consumerism, the art world and filmmaking itself.” This film is unlike anything I’ve seen. Banksy manages to put together a film that is smart, expository, honest, stunningly ironic, funny and a sort of saddening all at the same time. Sundance Director, John Cooper, said in a statement before the actual screening: “The story is so bizarre I began to question if it could even be real… but in the end I didn’t care. I feel bad I won’t be able to shake the filmmaker’s hand and tell him how much I love this film. I think I will shake everyone’s hand that day and hope I hit on Banksy somewhere. I love his work in all forms.” As do I, Cooper. As do I. Luckily for us Bostonians, “Exit through the Gift Shop” has finally made it to a theater near us, and for a mere ten bucks we can see it at Kendall Square any day of the week. Make the trip to Cambridge to see the latest from our beloved postmodern pioneer and form your own opinions. I’m convinced you’ll be glad you did.

The master of the house, clad in navy, khaki and pastels, is droll and sardonic.  The women around him flounce about in dazzling silks trailing billowy lacunas of scarf, sleeve and train. Despite their repressed politesse, they are perpetually high-pitched.

The liquor flows like water from crystal decanters. Irritation and misery permeate the air, but as it afflicts the absurd idle rich, you can’t help but smirk and chuckle from your distance.

It’s Noël Coward at the Lyric: a feast for the eyes, and a pleasant symphony of cadent British irony, whose substance lightly mocks at manners, mores and the eternal clash of the sexes.

“Blithe Spirit,”—the name is taken from Shelly’s “To A Skylark”—is a classic comic fantasy concerning marital discontent. Staged in this incarnation by artistic director, Spiro Veloudos, its premise revolves around the fascination of the scientific, modern British ruling class with some of the mysticism imported by the empire’s eastern territories.

When novelist Charles Condomine (Richard Snee) invites loony cockney psychic, Madam Arcati (Kathy St. George), to create a séance with his stuffy wife, Ruth (Anne Gottlieb) and their proper dinner guests, Dr. Bradman (Arthur Waldstein) and wife (Sarah deLima), he does so with no conscious desire to conjure the dead. His stated goal is to amuse his wife and guests while gathering research on this chicanery for a mystery novel he plans to write.

When, however, the séance seems convincingly to summon the ghost of Charles’ first wife on the eve of an argument he has been having with the second over whom he preferred, questions are raised both about his motives and his sanity. It only gets worse when Vivian (Paula Plum), the ghostly ex in question appears to Charles looking like an aged Marilyn Monroe complete with form-fitting white dress, formidable bust and platinum blond bob,  and wants his full attention.

Plum is excellent as always as this spectral vixen, playing naturally off of Snee, her real life husband, and Anne Gottlieb is a formidable counterpart as her shrewish living rival—but the show is stolen by St. George’s Madam Arcati, a petit bundle of crazed energy, thrusting herself in and out of trances with romantic aplomb.

A further touch of frantic comedy is provided by actress Ann Waldron as Edith, the Condomine’s overanxious cockney maid, who sprints through their home like a Boston marathoner despite all cries for decorum.

Blithe indeed, for all of its morbidity and its grim view of relationships, the Lyric production of this classic comedy is spirited and fun.

How about a former Dresden Doll?

The American Repertory Theater has announced it’s season opener for 2010-2011 and it’s sure to have some broad appeal: Amanda Palmer, headlining a production of the much celebrated 1960’s Broadway musical, “Cabaret.”

Come September, the A.R.T’s rebranded black box/dance club, OBERON, will became the Kit Kat Club, and Palmer, who collaborated with the A.R.T. before in her Dreden Doll-developed theatrical cabaret show, “The Onion Cellar,” will lead a cast including veterans Thomas Derrah and Jeremy Geidt. At the helm, will be Steven Bogart, an accomplished director and playwright who also happens to have served as Palmer’s drama teacher in the days of her youth at Lexington High School.

“I’m over the moon about being able to use OBERON as an artistic playground this fall . . . and this project is a long-time dream-collision of working on Cabaret and working with Steven Bogart, whose directing genius will finally find the audience it deserves,” says Palmer in an A.R.T. press release.

Judging from descriptions, “Cabaret” seems like a particularly apt lead-in to a season full of bizarre and surrealistic musical adaptations and collages, with strains of local flavor wafting throughout.

Next up after “Cabaret” will be “Alice Vs. Wonderland,” an experimental take on the oft-adapted Lewis Carroll work, directed by frequent A.R.T. collaborator, János Szász, followed by “The Blue Flower,” a multimedia musical work directed by Will Pomerantz with music, lyrics, script, and videography by Jim Bauer and artwork, story, and (additional) videography by Ruth Bauer.

According to the release, “The Blue Flower” offers a fusion of (again) Weimer cabaret and (this time) country and western music, as the soundtrack to a tale narrated by a painter about star-crossed lovers making their way through a Paris being battered by World War I.

Next up will come a whimsical chronicle, “R. Buckminster Fuller, The History (and Mystery) of the Universe,” about the Massachusetts-reared “Futurist, environmentalist, and geodesic dome designer,” who so endlessly inspired both scientists and science fiction writers, written and directed by D.W. Jacobs.

After that: two forays into Ancient Greek Drama: “Ajax,” Sophocles’ great tragedy about the strain of war on the mind of the warrior and the ways in which trauma-struck warriors should be confronted, followed by a brand new rock musical interpretation of the Aeschylus tragedy, “Prometheus Bound,” with text and lyrics by Steven Sater, music composed by Serge Tankian and direction by A.R.T. artistic director, Diane Paulus.

Last, but certainly not least if curiosity is your measure, will come “Death and the Powers,” also directed by Paulus, a cyber opera developed by the MIT Media Lab in partnership with the A.R.T. and composed by Tod Machover, whom the L.A. Times has called “American’s most weird composer,” with a libretto by former poet laureate and current Boston University professor, Robert Pinsky. This work promises “an expressively animated stage,” “a musical chandelier,” and “a chorus of robots.”

While you recover from this dizzying list, bear in mind that you don’t have to wait until next year for a taste of dramatic musical quirk with a Boston accent from the A.R.T. Their May premier is in fact one of the most bizarrely premised and yet doubtlessly the most pandering offering wrought upon Cambridge stages:

Johnny Baseball. A Red Sox musical.

Just like this year’s Sox season, this show’s prospects seem somewhat harrowing, but just like with the Sox, if you’re anything like me, you are absolutely compelled to see how it turns out.

Maybe that’s why the A.R.T. is closing with a Red Sox musical. They know of course, we’re in the mood for the drama and the pageantry, but also, if “Johnny Baseball” delivers, it will be a pleasant surprise, and if it flops, well, “wait ‘till next year!”

Betrayal

Harold Pinter

Company: Another Country Productions

Genre: Drama

Dates: May 20-June 5

Venue:

Stanford Calderwood Pavilion

Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont Street
South End, Boston, MA

(617) 426-5000

Blithe Spirit

by Noel Coward

Company: Lyric Stage Company

Genre: Comic drama

Dates: May 7-June 5

Lyric Stage Company

140 Clarendon St
Boston, MA 02116-5169
(617) 585-5678

Boston Theater Marathon XII

Company: Boston Playwrights’ Theater

Genre: New One-Acts

Dates: May 22-23

Venue:

Boston Playwrights’ Theater

949 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
(617) 353-5443

The Great American Trailer Park Musical

by Seth Rudetsky

Company: Speakeasy Stage Company

Genre: Musical

Dates: Through May 29

Venue:

Roberts Studio Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02116

(617) 426-5000

M² (Molière Squared)

by Molière

Company: Imaginary Beasts

Genre: Comedy

Dates: May 27-June 12

Venue:

Plaza Black Box

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street

Boston, MA 02116

(617) 933-8600

Prelude to A Kiss

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: May 14-June 13

Venue:

B.U. Theatre

264 Huntington Avenue

Boston MA 02115

(617) 933-8600

The Second City

Company: Improv Asylum

Genre: Improv Comedy

Dates: Through May 9

Venue:

Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the BCA

264 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

(617) 933-8600

Seth Rudetsky’s Deconstructing Broadway

by Seth Rudetsky

Company: Speakeasy Stage Company

Genre: One-Man Show

Dates: May 10-11

Venue:

Roberts Studio Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street
South End, Boston, MA

(617) 426-5000

CAMBRIDGE

Johnny Baseball

by Richard Dresser and William Reale

Company: American Repertory Theater

Genre: Musical

Dates: May 16-June 27

Venue:

Loeb Drama Center

64 Brattle Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

(617) 495.2668

The Lady with All the Answers

by David Rambo

Company: Nora Theater Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through May 13-June 22

Venue:

Central Square Theater

450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 576-9278

LOWELL

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

Company: Ganemeed Theater Project

Genre: Classic Drama

Dates: May 7-16

Venue:

Gallery 119
119 Chelmsford St.
Lowell, MA 01851

(617) 863-0664

The Blond, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead

by Robert Hewett

Company: Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through May 16

Venue:

Merrimack Repertory Theatre

50 E. Merrimack Street

Lowell, Massachusetts 01852

(978) 654-4MRT  (4678)

WATERTOWN

Hot Mikado

Book and lyrics by David H. Bell,

Music by Rob Bowman,

based on The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: Musical comedy

Dates: May 2-22

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

321 Arsenal Street

Watertown, MA 02472

(617) 923-8487

To send corrections or request a listing, contact our Theater Editor at jwrabin@gmail.com

Robert De Niro, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman will lend their talents to the multimedia presentation entitled “The Dream Lives On: A Portrait of the Kennedy Brothers.”

Premiering May 18 at 8 p.m. at Boston’s Symphony Hall, the show will feature music composed by Peter Boyer, words written by Tony Award-winning lyricist Lynn Ahrens, and the vocals of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, interspersed with dramatic readings of some of the best rhetorical moments from revered Boston natives, Jack, Bobby, Teddy as well as vintage video.

The show will run at Symphony Hall through May 22 and will repeat again on July 3 and 4 on the Charles River Esplanade as part of the” traditional “Pops Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular Concert,” with narrators to be announced.

Alec Baldwin, will take over narrating duties when “The Dream Lives On” plays at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lennox, on July 18 at 2:30 p.m., and Chris Cooper will step in on August 1 when the show plays on the Hyannis Village Green, near the famous “Kennedy compound.”

A historic year for the Pops and for the Kennedy family sets the stage for what promises to be a special summer for Boston.

Emerging America Festival

May 2-3, 14-16, throughout Boston and Cambridge

In May, the American Repertory Theatre the Huntington Theatre Company and the Institute for Contemporary Art present the Emerging America Festival, an event which will bring “some of the country’s most promising performers, writers, companies and directors to Boston,” says a joint press release.

The festivities kick-off on May 2, when affiliated actors will parade for the A.R.T.’s cabaret/dance club/experimental venue, OBERON, home of “The Donkey Show,” to the main stage of the Harvard Business Associations’ Mayfair celebration where, they will “perform in sideshows and dance parties all day long.”

In a new media twist, podcasts and walking tours will be published on the festival Web site featuring the voices of “artists, leaders, [and] figureheads of Cambridge and Boston,” as well as “short plays by Huntington Playwriting Fellows inspired by specific locations,” and other content that celebrates “the neighborhoods and artists of each organizations community, past and present.”

It’s the following weekend, however, May 14-16 that is the heart of the Emerging America Festival. A variety of new plays will be playing all day at night at OBERON, at the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, and at the ICA on the Waterfront. Offerings vary widely from dramas to comedies to the more experimental. Scheduling and pricing can be found at the festival Web site. Between viewings, revelers can visit the Festival Tent outside OBERON, where they can grab quaff and mingle with festival artists and fellow audience members.

“Shirley, Vermont Festival”

October 15-Novemeber 20, Boston Center for the Arts

So Boston’s theater companies and audiences will have plenty to keep them busy during the first two weeks of the last month of Spring, but none will be so busy as the team at the Huntington, who amidst preparations for the launch of their next main stage drama, “Prelude to a Kiss,” slated to run May 14-June 21, will also be planning a collaboration with smaller local groups, Speakeasy Stage Company, and Company One for the Fall.

Working together for the first time, come Fall, when thoughts turned to colored leaves, the trio of BCA neighbors will present three plays set in the fictional town of Shirley, Vermont from the pen of Amherst, Massachusetts native, Annie Baker.

The three plays, Circle Mirror Transformation, staged by the Huntington from October 15 – November 14, Body Awareness, staged by SpeakEasy Stage Company from October 22 – November 20, and The Aliens, staged by Company One, from October 29 – November 20, are the first by Baker, and have played at celebrated New York Venues to rave reviews.

Says Huntington Artistic Director, Peter DuBois in a press release, “Each of Annie’s plays stands on their own with their imagination and subtle humor, and seen together they form a striking portrait of Shirley, Vermont. The same is true for this festival; each company has their own identity and audience, but together they bring out the richness of the work being presented at the Calderwood.”

“We are thrilled to team up with up the Huntington and Company One to introduce Boston theatregoers to the delightful denizens of Shirley, Vermont,” adds SpeakEasy Stage Company Producing Artistic Director Paul Daigneault, “Both the partnership and the plays celebrate the importance and spirit of community.”

Says Shawn LaCount, Artistic Director of Company One, “Annie Baker’s voice is one of the freshest and most exciting on the American stage today. Company One shares her commitment to establishing community and exploring the fragility of the simple moments that is everyday life.”

Staggered scheduling allows ambitious viewers to see all three Shirley, Vermont plays in the same day. In conjunction with the festival, The Huntington will also present a staged reading of Baker’s fourth Shirley, Vermont play, “Nocturnia.”

Subscribers to all three companies will receive discounts to all festival plays. Tickets to individual performances will go on sale through bostontheatrescene.com in August.

The MAXXI, the National Museum of 20th Century Art, is a foundation set-up by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. Inside the MAXXI there are two different museums. One dedicated to art and the other to architecture. The museum is in synergy with all Rome’s international realities, starting with a cooperation agreement for establishing a partnership currently being negotiated with Fendi, the legendary maison that has always been sensitive to art and the signs of contemporary life.

The museum is a starkly 21st century building that stands out in B.C. Rome.

The opening of the MAXXI will mark a great moment for contemporary art as well as for Roman and Italian culture, involving all the more important state and private institutions. Together with the Music for Rome Foundation, a musical pathway has been created that will accompany visitors during the inauguration on May 28th and 29th. There will be more musical surprises for viewers with a project by the American Academy in Rome on May 30th. Furthermore, the National Gallery of Modern Art, together with other institutions belonging to the AMACI circuit, is participating in the museum inaugural exhibition loaning works of art. The MAXXI’s art and architectural collections, inspired to Zaha Hadid’s fluid shapes, interpret the museum’s interdisciplinary characteristics.

A year after Daniel Radcliffe galloped around naked in the Great White Way’s Equus, the young actor announced he will hit Broadway in a production of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”

It’s a powerful role to play, and Radcliffe will be just 21 when the show opens next year. Fifty years ago, the show started Robert Morse, who’s now the ad agency owner on Mad Men. Matthew Broderick did the show in a 1995 revival. The musical is about the adventures of J. Pierrepont Finch, an ambitious young man who dreams to rise from the basement mailroom to the top floors of management for the “World-Wide Wicket Company.”

All in all, let’s forgive Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project for celebrating the (probably) 456th birthday of The Artist Formerly Known As Shakespeare (or Shakespear, or Shagspere or Shaxberd) this Saturday in Cambridge. Commencing at 3 p.m., the Shakespearean shindig is conveniently located at John Harvard’s Brew House, so you can drink deep while you geek hard.

Other friends of the Bard on hand will include Orfeo Group, the Revels, Mass Mouth and Improv Boston. Groundlings can expect some performances form these groups, There will be a Shakespeare SLAM—an open mike for monologuers and sonneteers—a community reading of the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet.”

An A.S.P. press release further reports that “The Harvard Square Business Association and the Mayor of Cambridge will also be on hand to read the City Council resolution for the day.”

The groups had originally planned a parade across the city, but alas, “The rain, it raineth every day” (and weather forecasts have convinced them to keep things indoors).

Rain or shine, it should be a good day for cakes and ale—and ham.

April 2010

BOSTON

Adding Machine: A Musical

by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt

Company: Speakeasy Stage Company

Genre: New Musical

Dates: Through April 10

Venue:

Roberts Studio Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street
South End, Boston, MA

(617) 426-5000

Cats

By Trevor Nunn, Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Company: Broadway in Boston

Genre: Broadway Musical

Dates: April 13-18

Venue:

Colonial Theater

106 Boylston St

Boston, MA 02116

800-982-2787

Diary of Anne Frank

by Wendy Kesselman

Company: Boston Childrens’ Theater

Genre: Drama

Dates: April 10-18

Venue:

Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the BCA

264 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

(617) 933-8600

The Emancipation of Mandy and Miz Ellie

By Lois Roach

Company: Company One

Genre: Historical Drama

Dates: April 30-May 22

Venue:

Plaza Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street

Boston, MA 02116

(617) 933-8600

Farragut North

By Beau Willimon

Company: Zeitgeist Stage Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: April 30-May 22

Venue:

Plaza Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont Street

Boston, MA 02116

(617) 933-8600

Lady Day at Emerson’s Cafe

By Lanie Robertson

Company: Lyric Stage Company

Genre: New Musical

Dates: March 26-April 24

Lyric Stage Company

140 Clarendon St
Boston, MA 02116-5169
(617) 585-5678

Le Cabaret Grim

By Jason Slavick

Company: The Performance Lab

Genre: “Punk Cabaret”

Dates: April 8-24

Venue:

Stanford Calderwood Pavilion

Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont Street
South End, Boston, MA

(617) 426-5000

The Second City

Company: Improv Asylum

Genre: Improv Comedy

Dates: April 20-May 9

Venue:

Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the BCA

264 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

(617) 933-8600

Trad

by Mark Doherty

Company: Tir Na Theater

Genre: Comic Drama

Dates: April 8-24

Venue:

Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA

264 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

(617) 266-0800

Young Frankenstein

by Mel Brooks

Company: Broadway in Boston

Genre: Broadway Musical

Dates: April 20-May 2

Venue:

Boston Opera House
539 Washington Street
Boston, MA 02111-1718
(617) 259-3400

CAMBRIDGE

From Orchids to Octopi

by Melinda Lopez

Company: Catalyst Collaborative @M.I.T.

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through May 2

Venue:

Central Square Theater

450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 576-9278

LOWELL

The Last Days of Mickey and Jean

By Richard Dresser

Company: Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Genre: New Comic Drama

Dates: Through April 18

Venue:

Merrimack Repertory Theatre

50 E. Merrimack Street

Lowell, Massachusetts 01852

(978) 654-4MRT  (4678)

WATERTOWN

Opus

by Michael Hollinger

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: Contemporary Drama

Dates: March 28-April 17

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

321 Arsenal Street

Watertown, MA 02472

(617) 923-8487

To send corrections or request a listing, contact our Theater Editor at jwrabin@gmail.com

The Vatican has a very detailed, three-dimensional, Flash tour of the Sistine Chapel. There’s nothing new about the technology itself, but the implementation new for the historic chapel.

The wall paintings were executed by the most respected painters of the 15th century: Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli and their respective workshops, which included Pinturicchio, Piero di Cosimo and Bartolomeo della Gatta.

Sistine Chapel is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace.It is famous for its architecture, evocative of Solomon’s Temple of the Old Testament, and its decoration which has been frescoed throughout by the greatest Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and Sandro Botticelli. Under the patronage of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo painted 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) of the chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512. He resented the commission, and believed his work only served the Pope’s need for grandeur. However, today the ceiling, and especially The Last Judgement, are widely believed to be Michelangelo’s crowning achievements in painting.

The chapel takes its name from Pope Sixtus IV, who restored the old Cappella Magna between 1477 and 1480.

Now it’s possible admire the Sistine Chapel online. Of course it’s a different view but it’s a nifty experience, a 360-degree, zoomable simulacra of the legendary chamber, with its assorted frescos, some of the most famous religious artworks in history.

“We live on a farm in a rural area,” Dias said. “There aren’t a lot of jobs here, you kind of have to create your own. It’s a place where you just get really imaginative.”

When Paola found out she was expecting, opportunity came knocking, organically. With the original goal of tracking the growth and shape of his wife’s belly month-to-month, Mike started tracing her bump against the wall, like parents do with their children to track their height. Both Paola and Mike grew up in creative families; Paola paints and Mike’s mother is an artist. For these two parents-to-be, pencil wasn’t enough.

“Tons” of art supplies made the trek with them across country and so they began to utilize what they had around the house and kept the creative juices flowing. “First of all, we started to make a mess,” Paola laughed. But with some Japanese “shumi” ink that they had, what was created was “…so beautiful, it was this graceful outline.” They then experimented with ground earth ochres mixed with water, which produced vibrant colors. Calligraphy brushes painted polished lines.

Paola wasn’t particularly fond of the idea of her nude body decorating their home, so baby belly photographs weren’t an option.

“I wanted something I could frame and put in my baby nursery or around the house, something more subtle,” she said. “So we decided to pursue it.” The couple realized that the quality of their supplies was directly linked to the beauty in the product, so they ordered paper from Thailand, all-natural ochres, and calligraphy brushes.

Paola and Mike were so thrilled by their results that they decided to design some “kits” for some friends who were also expecting.

“We put them together because we thought we had come up with a great idea.” Eventually, people they didn’t even know were asking for kits and the Dias’ realized they had stumbled upon something beautiful, with just a bit of creativity and some household supplies.

Not exactly the next Picasso? Doesn’t make a difference, according to Paola. “It’s really easy,” she said. People who have never done it before paint amazingly and each woman expresses her creativity differently. “It was so great to see it with other people; they all have the same reaction, like ‘Oh my gosh, that is my body.’”

Not only does “Art Bellies,” the official name of Paola and Mike Dias’ business, give you a tangible and visible memory of your pregnant belly, the physical act of creating the art enables the expectant mother to be more open and at peace with her body.

“When parents find out they are having a baby, everyone rushes out to buy stuff, not many people create,” Dias said. “It’s nice to slow down, be more mindful and love your body. It gets you grounded with your body. That’s something that is really joyful for us to see.”

Art Bellies kits have been a success as a baby shower gift and/or game. Dias said women love to help each other create a beautiful outline of their bellies. A lot of parents, after the baby is born, stamp the baby’s footprint on the belly sketch, which makes for a special keepsake. Paola has seen women display the prints in offices, nurseries, and living rooms. They even had some silhouettes on display in the maternity ward of a New Hampshire hospital. One of the OB/GYN doctors loved them so much he took one home for his office.

Paola and Mike Dias are very optimistic about the future. Having started the business during one of the toughest economic times this country has seen in years, they feel fortunate to have created a business from simply doing something they love. They hope to expand Art Bellies as any small business might grow, focusing on the here and now.

They’re currently working on the packaging, making it more retail specific. Each Art Bellies kit comes with one white handmade paper, a color paper of choice that goes with the elements (air, earth, fire, water), all made of recyclable material, as well as the calligraphy brushes and ochres.

Only one year old, this budding business is destined for success. After all, women will always be having babies, right? Paola Dias teaches Spanish part-time and cares for their nine-month-old daughter. Her husband, Mike, is a technical writer. The couple is inspired by the natural art all around them in their small New Hampshire town, and hopes to continue to share their inspiration with parents-to-be around the world.

Art Bellies kits are sold online at their website and also at retailers in the New Hampshire area. They were recently featured in Pregnancy and Newborn magazines.

Burrows graduated from Boston University and began his career in theater with stints at the Lyric in Boston, the A.R.T. in Cambridge, the Merrimack Rep. in Lowell and the New Rep. in Watertown before heading to New York where he worked off-Broadway and eventually toured regional theaters around the country.

At the beginning of March, Burrows was named Artistic Director of Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project, after serving as interim Artistic Director during a 5-month national search.

“Allyn embodies the aesthetic and working vision of A.S.P.,” said search committee chair and A.S.P. board member, Cynthia Good, in a March 2 press release. “He comes to us understanding the vibrancy of the language of Shakespeare and the collaborative nature of our work with the company and the community. He will help us move into the next phase of our future.”

Burrows, an Eliot Award Winner, comes to the A.S.P. to listen and be heard—mostly, he suggests, to listen. “I cut my teeth at Shakespeare and Company he says, referring to the Massachusetts institution in the Berkshires, “I want to take the best parts of that and bring it here. To emphasize that.”

“That,” for Burrows, is a collaborative actor-director stake holding, in A.S.P.’s terms, “a resident acting company,” a picture which Burrows paints as a family with raucous round-table dinners and no one player holding the conch. “After all, it was Hemmings and Condell who gave us Shakespeare in the first place,” says Burrows, citing the friends and former stage managers of Shakespeare who published the “first folio” after his death. ¨19 heads,” he adds, “are better than one.”

Since 2004, a spirit of collaboration has ruled Actor’s Shakespeare Project. This plays out not only internally, but also by involving groups like Boston’s Arts Academy in their productions and by performing in both traditional and non-tradition theater spaces in different neighborhoods throughout the city in an attempt to bring people together.

“It’s about the clarity of storytelling in different venues, unusual venues,” Burrows explains, “The story has to involve the space and the audience has to be a major player in it.” Of course not any space will do (“like are there bathrooms?”), but Burrows yields little else in his approach. His aesthetic is minimalistic, and he seeks above all to bind audiences to the spell of Shakespeare’s words. “We are a voice and text based company. Our productions rely on the relationships occurring on stage.”

For his first season as Artistic Director, Burrows reports “a tight, tight schedule — a huge chunk of meat to be gnawing on.” The feast begins with a rich trio of histories. “The time is right for histories,” he explains. “Maybe it has to do with the president we have in the white house or maybe we just have more time to think about things.”

At present, Burrows is looking forward to stepping into the title role in the “Timon of Athens” next month. “Its a great story,” he says, “Timon goes to the woods, subsists on roots and dies a wretched death in a cave.”

It sounds like an ominous journey, but perhaps it beats the New York subways.

Taking on the title role in this solid, often powerful staging from Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Jason Bowen, is a convincing commanding officer—but he’s far more diplomat than brooding hulk—not the usual reverberate bass to fill the ample boots of the Moor of Venice.

With an upright carriage and an upturned chin, Bowen’s Othello measures his movements, looks his converser squarely in the eye, flashes a winning smile when it serves him, and seems to choose his words to the degree that poetry seems plausible.

In other words he is perfectly in control—until he isn’t.

Iago, the infamous architect of his downfall, is played here by Ken Cheeseman, who,

broad-shouldered and lanky in a brown leather jacket and military fatigues, bestrides his castmates like a colossus.

Iago is our master of ceremonies for the evening, a task that Cheeseman discharges with great alacrity and a nimble tongue. He is convincing as a casually charismatic, two-faced flatterer—but there is something missing. He’s a little too charming. Sure he’s evil, but he’s not—as this great villain should be—the kind of sociopath that makes your skin crawl, that makes you horribly uncomfortable until he leaves the stage. Nor does he steal the show, as an Iago often can, by inducing the kind of poetic Stockholm Syndrome that makes you root for him in spite of yourself. Cheeseman’s Iago works, but is more efficient than anything else.

Staged by director, Judy Braha, in the South End’s Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, a funky, modern-looking former church with a spiral staircase and a balcony, the play is set in a Venice and Cyprus of “the Near Future.” It’s an amorphous setting, which turns out to mean a police state in which soldiers wield riot shields and batons. With a minimalist set, and a soundtrack of eerie ambient music to ratchet up the tension, this concept stays out of the way enough to frame the play nicely.

With his naïve young accomplice Rodrigo (played for sympathy more than laughs by Doug Lockwood), Iago wastes no time in making mischief, anonymously informing Barantia (normally Barbantio, but a mother in this version, played by Bobbie Steinbach) that her daughter, Desdemona (the charming and understated Brooke Hardman), has eloped with Othello. This is scandalous not only because the wedding takes place without parental consent, but also because Othello is a Moor, a black man, and his winning of Desdemona is portrayed as abduction.

Barbantia takes her fury to the Duke, a character who is usually a mere functionary in the plot, but who, played masterfully by Paula Langton in a Hillaryesque pants suit, immerges as a compelling politician forced to make some quick calculations. Loyal as she is to the senator, Othello’s full powers of persuasion are on display and so the Duke ultimately sides with the outsider-turned-military hero. Together they diffuse the conflict. But Iago is already busy at work on phase two. He hates Othello, in part because of rumors that his own wife, Emilia (a second role for the impressive Paula Langdon, disguised in rags), has also succumbed to Othello’s charms. Iago also hates the generally esteemed Michael Cassio, Othello’s right-hand man, (played here with more earnestness than dash by Michael Forden Walker), mainly because Cassio has surpassed him in rank.

Iago’s plot to take down both at once is hatched with only we, the audience as knowing accomplices. Under the guise of true loyalty, he will, with feigned reluctance, convince Othello that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair. The ingenious details, all based upon an astute assessment of each character’s principle weakness, will be discovered as he goes. But he knows from the start that he will get Cassio’s place and provoke Othello to betray his stoic image, and he knows that many are just waiting for the Moor to prove himself an unworthy match for his highborn white wife.

As usual, this Actors’ Shakespeare Project production places its heaviest weight on the words, a wise decision when dealing with one of the undisputedly greatest scripts of all time. It’s a story of ambition and envy that asks just what people are willing to believe and why. It has an almost omnipotent villain whose cunning in treachery can’t help but make you smile before you cringe, and it has a great tragic hero—the more he makes you admire him, the more he shatters your heart. In this production Bowen certainly finds ways to do both.

Othello plays through April 4 at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts.

Adding Machine: A Musical

by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt

Company: Speakeasy Stage Company

Genre: New Musical

Dates: March 12- April 10

Venue:

Roberts Studio Theater

Calderwood Pavillion

Boston Center for the Arts

527 Tremont St.

617-426-5000

Apple

by Vern Thiessen

Company: Company One and Phoenix Theatre Artists

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through April 3

Venue:

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

949 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

617-353-5443

Becky Shaw

by Gina Gionfriddo

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: Comic Drama

Dates: Through April 4

Venue:

Boston University Theatre

264 Huntington Avenue

617-266-0800

Entertaining Mr. Sloane

By Joe Orton

Company: Publik Theatre Boston

Genre: Comic Drama

Dates: March 11-April 3

Venue:

Plaza Theater

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont St.

617-933-8600

Lady Day at Emerson’s Cafe

By Lanie Robertson

Company: Lyric Stage Company

Genre: New Musical

Dates: March 26-April 24

Lyric Stage Company

140 Clarendon St.

617-585-5678

Legacy of Light

by Lois Roach

Company: Lyric Stage Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through March 13

Lyric Stage Company

140 Clarendon St.

617-585-5678

The Lion King

by Tim Rice

Company: Broadway in Boston

Genre: Broadway Musical

Dates: Through March 21

Venue:

Boston Opera House
539 Washington St.

617-259-3400

Stick Fly

by Lydia Diamond

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: Through March 28

Venue:

Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA

264 Huntington Ave.

617-266-0800

Very Hungry Caterpillar and other Eric Carl Favorites

By Jim Morrow

Company: Broadway in Boston

Genre: Broadway Musical

Dates: March 20

Venue:

Colonial Theater

106 Boylston St.

800-982-2787

We All Will Be Received

By Kathy Wittman, Mal Malme and Renee C. Farster

Company: Queer Soup Theater

Genre: Experimental Drama

Dates: March 11-27

Venue:

Stanford Calderwood Pavilion

Boston Center for the Arts

539 Tremont St.

617-426-5000

Teaser:

Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: February 19-March 27

Venue:

Boston University Theatre

264 Huntington Ave.

617 266-0800

CAMBRIDGE

Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky

Company: Nora Theater Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: February 11- March 14

Venue:

Central Square Theater

450 Massachusetts Ave,
617-576-9278

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets

Company: American Repertory Theater

Genre: Modern Drama

Dates: Through March 20

Venue:

Loeb Drama Center

64 Brattle St.

617-547-8300

LOWELL

The Last Days of Mickey and Jean

By Richard Dresser

Company: Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Genre: New Comic Drama

Dates: March 18-April 11

Venue:

Merrimack Repertory Theatre

50 E. Merrimack St.

978-654-4MRT  (4678)

WATERTOWN

boom

by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through March 13

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

Black Box Theater

321 Arsenal St.

617-923-8487

Opus

by Michael Hollinger

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: Contemporary Drama

Dates: March 28-April 17

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

321 Arsenal St.

617-923-8487

To send corrections or request a listing, contact our Theater Editor at jwrabin@gmail.com

After all, this relationship comedy about a psychology student striving to order her life after losing her father, features a histrionic, a narcissist, a borderline personality and a hipster with a savior complex, all going at each other full bore.

But that’s just the fun of this engrossing and consistently funny character study, helmed by Huntington Artistic Director, Peter DuBois, and written by Gina Gionfriddo, an old colleague of DuBois’s from her days at Brown University. Rhode Island is in fact, one of the settings of “Becky Shaw,” and inside Rhodey jokes abound.

The play begins, however, in a hotel room in New York City, where Suzanne Slater  (played with intelligence and charm by Keira Naughton), a wayward PhD candidate in Psych. from a wealthy family, is having a Hamlet moment. Dressed in an inky cloak three months after the death of her father (only it’s a sexy black dress), she must confront the indomitable matriarch of her family, Susan (played by the wonderfully commanding, Maureen Anderman) who, to Suzanne’s horror, has already taken a lover. The subject at hand is no less than the division of the Slater kingdom.

In Suzanne’s case, it isn’t a Claudius, a Gertrude or a Horatio telling her to can the theatrical mourning. It is an odd duck with a smooth baring named Max Garret (played with a truly creepy mechanical cockiness by Seth Fisher). Just whom Max is, is not made immediately clear, but he is intimately tied to the Slater clan, he is a power broker with a head for numbers, and he is here on “Team Suzanne.” His advice: let me handle the money, stop moping about like a child, and go get a hobby.

Suzanne heeds these pointed words, heads off on a ski trip, and, half-a-year later, she is married to Andrew Porter (excellently portrayed by Eli James) an infuriatingly compassionate writer, who longs to quit his job as an office manager and go back to the less draining (and less lucrative) grind of a “coffee collective.” When Max, in town on business, stops by for a visit, Andrew makes the catastrophic decision to set him up on a date with a work friend: the eponymous Becky Shaw, an office temp with little education and less confidence, and of course, a shadowy past.

The combination of Andrew and Becky reveals Max’s full color. A chilly but effective pragmatist, the man has a lack of tact that rivals Larry David’s. Like David, his behavior is cringe inducing—but he often says what you wish you could say in situations like his. It’s pretty clear that Max and Becky are not about to hit it off famously, but that disaster that mars their date is both unexpected and sobering. In its wake, the two are unsettlingly estranged, and when Suzanne and Andrew are forced to make sense of it, and to choose sides, everything about the relationships between all four characters is called into question.

“Becky Shaw” is a comedy with a lot to say. It pits some strong, well-defined and complex characters against one another, provoking challenging questions about the balance of romance and pragmatism that go into choosing, and standing by a mate. It manages to do this with jokes, and without falling back on emotive monologues.

It works because, yes, you know people like that. Which makes it funny—but maybe also a little bit frightening, if it does it’s job.

Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, “Becky Shaw” plays at the B.U. Theatre through April 4.

The spoke with one voice in our interview.

BLAST: Introduce yourselves. Where do the nicknames Sten and Lex come from?

STEN AND LEX: Sten stands for “stencil” and Lex means “law” hence the pair is “the law of stencil”.

BLAST: Could you digress and tell me what characterizes your style and what techniques you use?

STEN AND LEX: Unlike many street artists, we do not have a artistic background. Ten years ago we started using a stencil when the idea of street art did not have much legitimacy in Italy. The technique we use is called “hole school” and consists of stencils with many holes of different sizes that all together provide a highly photographic image. This technique was also often used for printing newspapers in the Sixties and Seventies. In addition to the “hole” technique, we also use the superimposed lines technique. Finally, what characterizes our work on the streets are the very light-weight paper posters, that adhere closely to the walls and that we glue on to the walls of the city.

BLAST What degree of experimentation do you use with the stencil technique and use of color?

STEN AND LEX: We prefer black and white using half shades and therefore dots and lines, because, observing the art from a distance, there are chiaroscuros that make the images realistic. In our more recent work, however, we have used the four-color process which involves using superimposed transparent colors.

BLAST: To what extent is street art political, and is yours?

STEN AND LEX: A famous street artist (Shepard Fairey) used Barack Obama’s face and certainly contributed to spreading his image on a large scale. In this sense he launched a political message almost equal to that of an election poster. In our stencils, instead, the contents tend to not include politics, with only a few exceptions, although the interpretation of our work is subjective.

BLAST: Is there an ancient, modern or contemporary artist who changed your perspectives of things?

STEN AND LEX: In the work we are showing at the exhibition that will open Friday, March 12th at the Gallery CO2 (Borgo Vittorio, 9 -Rome) we used a technique that consists of incorporating the stencil itself, which, since it is made of paper, remains only partly impressed on the paper. The destruction of the stencil becomes part of the work of art. Some have seen in this, references to Mimmo Rotella’s décollage and collage work.

BLAST: Is it not a little contradictory to work anonymously and then also hold an exhibition in an art gallery and show oneself. Does it make sense?

STEN AND LEX: There is a contradiction. However, exhibiting our work in an art gallery allows us to establish contacts. Without that we do not get commissions seeing that in Italy there is still a very high barrier between street art and institutional art. Street art. in fact, provides one with the opportunity of having an immense audience, often far larger than the traditional one of an art gallery. In Italy however, this mentality still does not exists and hence we must often show our work in art galleries.

BLAST: Do your projects for the future include spending time in the US, the homeland of street art, and managing to leave a trace there too?

STEN AND LEX: (In) October we will be able to present our work in the United States in New York at the Brooklynite Gallery, where we will be given us a wall to work on together with another street artist called Gaia.

Maybe you’ve downed cocktails in a museum before?  If so, you might be expecting music along the lines of a string quartet.  But here, the atmosphere is completely different.  Once you get past the velvet ropes, you’re not greeted with Haydn or Mozart.  Instead you’ll hear the thumbing sounds of spin professionals like DJ Coralcola.  The subdued lighting and tightly-packed crowd adds to the relaxed and informal atmosphere.

Unlike many cocktail parties, there’s more to do here than eat, drink and talk.  On any given night there might be live musicians performing in one part of the museum, informal tours in another part, and people trying their hands at sketching somewhere else.

But best of all, there’s the collection itself.  Art by masters like Botticelli, Vermeer, and Rembrandt share the space with signed letters from George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt.  There’s so much to look at and talk about, boredom is impossible.

Once folks get a little loosened up (Bellinis are a cocktail of choice since the building is a facsimile Venetian palazzo), friends and strangers alike ask each other questions about the amazing stuff on display or share their theories about the infamous 1990 robbery, a still-unsolved heist that netted $500 million in art.

The party ends at just 9:30 pm, so think of this as a unique place to start your night before walking to a bar in Brigham Circle or hopping a cab to nightclubs on Lansdowne Street, in the Theater District, or wherever the spirit takes you.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, affectionately known as “Mrs. Jack,” had a reputation as a party girl.  She’d be glad to know that her palatial former home, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is once again host to music, laughter, and the sound of clinking glasses.

Gardner After Hours, Third Thursdays 5:30-9:30 p.m., see “gardnermuseum.org/afterhours” for price schedule

It’s clear why the play was chosen for this season. “Paradise Lost” was written by a poetic revolutionary during a time in which global economical disaster rippling from Wall Street was forcing Americans to question the very capitalist system that offered a cherished standard of living to the fortunate and a dream of an attainable-feeling glamour and comfort to those it had left out. Odets’ script explores the loss of the opportunities and dreams promised by a wealthier America. His tragic Gordon family plummets with the stock market, freezes up in denial trying to wait things out, and then finally, humbled, strives to come to terms with a new America whose playing field is level — but mired in tears and blood. It’s a powerful play, Odets’ most prideful effort, and one that he believed would bring audiences closer together and make them glad to be alive.

Fish, sadly, does not trust the script to speak for itself. Rather, he manufactures his own tone and set of symbols into which the play is caged. His production is neither set during the Great Depression nor in the present. References to the two periods battle one another as the audience searches for some sort of location. We’re given a set that is part family estate and part warehouse. A large kitchen table, the play’s central icon, sits in the middle of a vast and mostly bare stage, between a stack of wooden pallets to its far left and, to its right, an idealized statue of a man running, suggesting one of the play’s protagonists, Ben Gordon (the charismatic Hale Appleman), a former Olympic runner.

The Gordon family, their neighbors, and associates, spend the entire (nearly three hour) play (broken into three acts with intermissions) sitting at this table, apart from when they mill or sprawl around it. As they mumble to one another, they rarely face the audience and often avoid one another’s faces as well. Behind them hangs a gigantic screen onto which is projected some thematic television clips, some family movies seemingly set in an alternate production, some footage of talking heads from news programs over which character dialogue is sometimes (absurdly) dubbed, and some other bizarre and distracting effects that wretch the play away from its slightly poeticized realism into the realm of surrealistic collage.

If you drink some caffeine, crane your neck, squint your eyes, and ignore the strange meta-narratives, you might pick up the story of Leo (David Chandler) and Clara (Sally Wingert) Gordon, an upper middle class family struggling to hold together their family in light of the dying of their business. Their grown-up children are languishing. Their son Ben, the former runner, gets married, but with no money or prospects his new life is off to a sluggish start. Their younger son, Julie (T. Ryder Smith), who in other days may actually have been groomed as the family’s new patriarch, wilts into depression. Their daughter Pearl (Therese Plaehn) does nothing but obsessively practice the piano (or in this production, the anachronistic keyboard synthesizer with earphones to hide the instruments’ haunting effects) dreaming that she and her (absent) musician fiancé are just waiting for their big breaks. Also present are their doddering friend Gus Michaels (the great Thomas Derrah), a tragic clown, and their furnace man, a radical who lost his sons in the Great War and now looks only to ideology for comfort. This collection of grim fallen angels are poked and prodded, tempted and challenged by a series of friends and associates (most notably by Ben’s gangsterish buddy Kewpie played excellently by Karl Bury), until they must step out of their torpor and into the frightening new world.

These characters are well drawn and this production’s actors seem well cast. But it’s hard to tell. I spent most of this play trying to get my bearings and the remainder waiting for at least some sound and fury.

Far from in paradise, I mostly just found myself lost.

“Paradise Lost” runs through March 20 at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square.

Perhaps the Lyric is seeking to restore balance after staging an all male three-person drama.

But even if I did have ovaries , I’m not sure how captured I would have been by this didactic, low-stakes, historical comedy about women in science, a New England premier from  playwright Karen Zacarias, staged by guest director, Karen Roach.

The cast is not to be faulted here—they are generally a skilled and charismatic bunch lead by Sarah Newhouse and Diego Arciniegas (the long-time Boston actor and Artistic Director of the Publik Theater), as historical figures, Émile du Châtelet, an under-appreciated Enlightenment-era physicist , and her far more celebrated lover, Voltaire.

The problem with the play has more to do with its structure. “Legacy of Light” switches back and forth between two settings.  Its French Enlightenment plot is based around Émile du Châtelet’s race to complete a scientific discovery before giving birth to her second child, an act which, given her advanced age and declining health, she fears could be fatal. Its second setting is modern day New Jersey, in which a thematically linked plot emerges around Olivia (Susanne Nitter), a successful astronomer who, unable to give birth herself, hires a surrogate, a quirky aspiring fashion designer named Millie (Rosalie Norris) who needs the money more than she immediately lets on.

Part of the problem is that neither of these “conflicts” involve much conflict. There are some decisions to made, but their results are never really in doubt. There is the possibility that Olivia (or Millie) may turn out to be a bad mother, or that Millie might not give up her baby, but these threats are vague and never pushed very far. We learn that Millie has a secret—but it’s not a particularly damning one. Olivia’s husband Peter (Allan Mayo, Jr.) is threatened at one point—but it’s a threat that lasts a matter of seconds.

There’s the possibility of Émile du Châtelet’s imminent death, but then, as we are reminded by the characters themselves, they are already dead, their legacies determined. This introduces another serious problem with the play: the treatment of its most compelling characters, Émile du Châtelet and Voltaire.  Rather than letting her interpretation of these characters unfold, Zacarias faces them outwards, having them introduce themselves and then summarize their lives, feelings and accomplishment, rather than playing them out before us. Similarly, she stages opportunities for Olivia to lecture as well, all but spelling out the connections she sees between science and motherhood.

So there’s not much to grip us here. No mystery to solve and not much room to explore, with the characters reliably informing us both what they think and how they feel.

It doesn’t help matters that the production is set less in the three apartments the script calls for, than in a nebulous region of stay-speckled sky, with a large tree growing prominently from its blue floor. In other words, like the playwright, the designer offers a theme rather than a compelling, complex reality.  It isn’t even a blank space on which to project our imagination—it’s in fact rather crowded, as we learn in the first scene in which Émile du Châtelet’s lovers fence with long foils across roughly four feet of stage. It’s as awkward an exchange as the love scene that precedes it.

The structure of” Legacy of Light” is reminiscent to that of “Arcadia,” Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece about impossible quests for knowledge, which also switches between two historical settings and which features a fictional female physicist who, like Émile du Châtelet, studies Newton and is linked to a famous historical writer (her tutor’s friend, Lord Byron).   “Arcadia’s” the two plots are not merely thematically linked. Both take place within the same house. The scholars of the play’s modern setting come into conflict while seeking to unravel a mystery that we see revealed in the play’s historical setting. One set of scholars in conflict is studying a second. “Arcadia” is in a sense a play of ideas. It is academic and cerebral. Above all though, it is sold by the intense, complex and moving relationships between its characters, the comedy and pathos of their thwarted romances, as chaotic as the world upon which they try to impose order.

Zacarias’ play is built on some interesting ideas—like the idea that a woman’s natural ability to give birth can both uniquely aid and uniquely thwart her other creative powers—but  she misses the fact that in a play of ideas, the characters and their conflicts can’t also simply be ideas. They in fact have to be almost twice as vital, their struggle, almost twice as urgent, and just as earth-bound, detailed and concrete, as the ideas behind them are lofty and complex.

I am glad that Émile du Châtelet’s is getting some attention, here, and I hope it so happens that any woman who sees this play will be inspired to be as creative as the best physicists, fashion designers and mothers.

But I’d like to have seen a little more data to support this hypothesis.

“Legacy of Light” plays at the Lyric Stage Company through March 13.

“Stick Fly’s” characters are impressively educated intellectuals, and if its themes sound ripped from a sociology syllabus, don’t be alarmed—the greatest strength of this superbly acted comic drama from the pen of Huntington fellow Lydia Diamond, is that it never lectures, never preaches, never declares. What it does do is explore and provoke.

Diamond shifts your allegiance from character to character giving each a range of painful slip-ups and eloquent defenses.  If her characters vent about their various victimhoods’ in familiar terms, they are also wise enough to discover that beneath their complaints about society, more primal issues seethe. Some conflicts may be socially constructed, but others are just drives in action. The trick is figuring at which influence is at play when or how much of one steers another.

“Stick Fly’s” plot is driven by Kent “Spoon” LeVay (Jason Dirden) , who has set his sights on novel writing. It’s a new passion discovered in the wake of expensive degrees in both law and business, fully funded by his father, Joe LeVay (Wendell W. Wright), one of the most wealthy and prominent African American land owners on Martha’s Vineyard.  Having completed his first book, Spoon returns to his father’s house for the weekend with his manuscript under one arm, and his brilliant and beautiful fiance, Taylor (Nikkole Salter), on the other. He’s come home to introduce his father to each.  This won’t be easy for anyone. Spoon and Taylor are both terrified of the LeVay’s patriarch, who tends to view his youngest son as a mooching loafer.

To help ease tensions, Spoon has formed an alliance with his older brother, a laconic playboy called Flip (Billy Eugene Jones), who also has a delicate mission before him, namely, to introduce Joe to the current lady in his own life—Kimber (Rosie Benton), a wealthy Cape Codder whose nearly translucent complexion is guaranteed to spark Joe’s ire.  So Spoon and Flip are united in common cause, but as neither seems to have guessed, Taylor and Kimber are far from eager to play for the same team.

Meanwhile, two woman are conspicuously absent from the scene. Mrs. LeVay is detained elsewhere and so is the LeVay’s longtime housekeeper. For the latter, a substitute has been dispatched.  Cheryl (Amber Iman), a fiercely intelligent young spitfire who is just blossoming into maturity (thanks in part to the high school scholarship money of Joe LeVay) is cast in the role of “black maid” for the weekend. Played with scene-stealing perfection by Iman, Cheryl becomes a touchstone of sorts for the LeVay’s and their guests, all of whom have struggled to uneasy terms with the privileges that have defined their respective backgrounds.

The social warfare that ensues is fluidly staged by Kenny Leon, the director who recently brought August Wilson’s Fences, back Huntington audiences.  It unfolds in a set exquisitely designed by David Gallo, featuring an often simultaneously active living room, kitchen and porch as its elegant three-ring circus. This house hums with history and life. It’s surroundings ring with a chorus of laughter alternating with gasps of horror, clucks of disgust and cheers of triumph—the sounds of an audience whose engagement is total.  They’ll have a lot to think about on the ferry back to Boston.

Presented in cooperation with Arena Stage, “Stick Fly” plays through March 28 in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts.

“Kids rule, adults are serious and boring.  They say the classroom is a stage as well.  It’s unpredictable, just like doing standup,” said Crohn.

Some people may consider Crohn’s performances to be vulgar and certainly not suitable for a young audience.  And today’s technology makes it easy for anyone to look him up on the internet; even Crohn’s fifth graders could gain access to his performances on YouTube.

“Vulgar, wow, that’s such an adult word. It’s hard to spell,” Crohn joked. “ You know what else is hard to spell, my last name; making it hard for my internet savvy students to find me.” Touche, Mr. Crohn.

To his delight, some of Crohn’s students are already showing signs of a future in comedy.  “I see their ability to be funny without trying. Children have an amazing sense of comedic timing which they don’t even realize,” he said.

Crohn was born in California, but his family moved to New York shortly thereafter.  When he was just five years old his parents packed him up again and moved to Boston.  Said Crohn, “My parents made me … you really don’t have a say in such matters.”

Looking back at what he was like in the fifth grade, Crohn called himself a “popular loser.”  “It was the year before we started getting grades, so I think it went pretty well.”

While he was growing up, Crohn’s father owned a record store; the majority of the old albums were live stand up performances. 

Although Crohn has wanted to become a comedian “since birth”, he discovered his influences while going through his father’s albums.

“I say it was Henny Youngman [who influenced him to become a comedian], but it was really Steve Martin’s Wild And Crazy Guy which made me want to do stand up,” he said.

Crohn didn’t begin doing comedy until April 2004; his first show was at Dick Doherty’s Comedy Vault.  “I had always wanted to be a comedian but forgot about [it] while I was in college,” said Crohn.

He gets his inspiration for the theme of his shows from his family and friends.  Crohn says his live performances contain “Fast jokes. I don’t want you to catch your breath.”

In 2007, Crohn produced and hosted the Punk Rock Stand Up Show.  “It was basically just a showcase of talented comics and local punk bands in rock clubs. The highlight was a show featuring comic Doug Stanhope.” 

The Punk Rock Stand Up Show took place in several different venues around Boston including The Reel Bar, O’Brien’s, Great Scott and The Abbey.  The Punk Rock Stand Up Show ended in 2008 after about 20 shows.

When asked what he does when he’s not teaching or doing comedy, Crohn said, “I am always doing these two things…always.”

Crohn has shared the stage with many acts including Pauly Shore, Jim Breuer, Jim Norton, and Pablo Francisco.  He has even appeared in an episode of “Quiet Desperation,” a reality sitcom that features comedians, musicians and performers from the Boston area.  Recently, Crohn was a semi-finalist in the Boston Comedy Festival.

It’s been almost 6 years since Crohn began his career as a comedian and he is quickly gaining momentum in Boston.  To check him out for yourself, head to Nick’s Comedy Stop on March 12 and 13.

Proof by David Auburn

Company: Arlington Friends of the Drama

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 12-21

Venue:

AFD Theater

22 Academy St.

Arlington, MA  02476

781-646-5922

BOSTON

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: Modern Drama

Dates: Through February 7

Venue:

Boston University Theatre

264 Huntington Ave.

Boston, MA 02115

617-266-0800

The Good Negro

Company: Company One

Genre: Contemporary Drama

Dates: Through February 6

Venue:

Boston Center for the Arts

Boston Center for the Arts

Plaza Theatre
539 Tremont St.
South End, Boston, MA

617-426-5000

The Island of the Slaves

by Pierre Marivaux

Company: Orfeo Group

Genre: Historical Drama

Dates: February 11- March 6

Venue: Boston Center for the Arts

Plaza Theatre
539 Tremont St.
South End, Boston, MA

617-426-5000

Legacy of Light by Lois Roach

Company: Lyric Stage Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: February 12-March 13

Lyric Stage Company

140 Clarendon St.
Boston, MA 02116-5169
617-585-5678

The Lion King by Tim Rice

Company: Broadway in Boston

Genre: Broadway Musical

Dates: February 16-March 21

Venue:

Boston Opera House
539 Washington St.
Boston, MA 02111-1718
617-259-3400

New England Russian Theater Festival

Company: Lau Lapides Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 18-21

Venue:

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

949 Commonwealth Ave.

Boston, MA 02215

781-504-7171

One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace

Company: Whistler in the Dark

Genre: Drama

Dates February 5-21

Venue:

The Factory Theatre
791 Tremont St.

Boston, MA 02118

Private Fears in Public Places

by Alan Ayckbourn

Company: Zeitgeist Stage Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 12-March 6

Venue:

Boston Center for the Arts

Plaza Theatre
539 Tremont St.
South End, Boston, MA

617-426-5000

Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond

Company: Huntington Theatre Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: February 19-March 27

Venue:

Boston University Theatre

264 Huntington Ave.

Boston, MA 02115

617-266-0800

CAMBRIDGE

Gatz Part 1 & 2

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

adapted by Elevator Repair Service

Company: American Repertory Theater

Genre: Drama (Experimental)

Dates: Through February 7

Venue:

Loeb Drama Center

64 Brattle St.
Cambridge, MA 02138

617-547-8300

Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky

Company: Nora Theater Company

Genre: New Drama

Dates: February 11- March 14

Venue:

Central Square Theater

450 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-576-9278

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets

Company: American Repertory Theater

Genre: Modern Drama

Dates: February 27-March 20

Venue:

Loeb Drama Center

64 Brattle St.
Cambridge, MA 02138

617-547-8300

LOWELL

Black Pearl Sings! By Frank Higgins

Company: Merrimack Repertory Theatre

Genre: New Musical

Dates: February 11-March 7

Venue:

Merrimack Repertory Theatre

50 E. Merrimack St.

Lowell, Massachusetts 01852

978-654-4MRT (4678)

NEWBURYPORT

Alice is Wonderglass

Company: Actors Studio of Newburyport

Genre: New Drama

Dates: February 11-27

Venue:

Actors Theater of Newburyport

The Tannery
Mill #1, Suite 5
Newburyport, MA 01950
978-465-1229

SALEM

13 Things About Ed Carpollotti

By Jeffrey Hatcher

Company: Salem Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 27

Venue:

Salem Theatre Company

90 Lafayette St.

Salem, MA 01970

978-790-8546

Life With Your Teenager: Bedroom or Biohazard? By Judith Black

Company: Salem Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 20

Venue:

Salem Theatre Company

90 Lafayette St.

Salem, MA 01970

978-790-8546

Love Letters by A.R. Gurney

Company: Salem Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 13

Venue:

Salem Theatre Company

90 Lafayette St.

Salem, MA 01970

978-790-8546

WALTHAM

Funnyhouse of a Negro

by Adrienne Kennedy

Company: Brandeis Theatre Company

Genre: Drama

Dates: February 4-14

Venue:

Laurie Theater

415 South St.
Waltham, MA 02453

781-736-3400

WATERTOWN

boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: New Drama

Dates: January 17-February 6

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

Black Box Theater

321 Arsenal St.

Watertown, MA 02472

617-923-8487

Indulgences by Chris Craddock

Company: New Repertory Theater

Genre: New Drama

Dates: Through February 6

Venue:

Arsenal Center for the Arts

321 Arsenal St.

Watertown, MA 02472

617-923-8487

To send corrections or request a listing, contact our Theater Editor at jwrabin@gmail.com

Here at Blast, we’re big fans of The Good Men Project, and we’ve put our pens to Shepard Fairey and his Boston drama.

In this video, the iconic artist discusses modern manhood for The Good Men Project during a panel discussion in Los Angeles.

Tracy Scott Wilson’s poetic, ensemble-driven drama about the Birmingham march on Jim Crow is a drama about flawed men and women thrust into a historic movement that grows from quick, chance decisions, and many missteps along the way.

Just in time for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Company One has brought a powerful, highly relevant parable to Boston, with direction by Summer L. Williams, in which the Southern sun seems to beat down over a small auditorium in the BCA on a winter night.

The play centers around the Reverend Lawrence (Jonathan L. Dent), a figure loosely based on King contemporary Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who arrives in 1950’s Birmingham to organize non-violent resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

Dent’s Lawrence is a figure in transition: filled with youthful innocence, his feet are rooted to the pulpit, but his congregation and his historical moment wretch him from this sanctum and thrust him into streets engulfed by violence. “Goodness,” for him, becomes a complex compromise between the needs of the everyday and the necessity of conveying a higher morality to a fearful white public.

As the story opens, Claudette Sullivan, played magnificently by Marvelyn McFarlane, is restrained and beaten for allowing her daughter to use a ‘whites only’ restroom. Her tormentor is Gary Thomas Rowe, a brute with a toy sheriff’s badge and a vehemently racist worldview.

Sullivan and her daughter will unintentionally become the face of Rev. Lawrence’s boycott against Birmingham merchants. Meanwhile, Rowe (based on the real figure of this name) is recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

As Sullivan and her husband Pelzie (James Milord) struggle with the burden of living as propped-up symbols, Rowe’s journey is similarly complex. The Klan provides an outlet for his most violent ambitions, and he must live with the deeds his rhetoric demands, making him a man both tormented by violence and mocked by the foolish paternalism of his FBI handlers.

In addition to presenting complex character studies, “The Good Negro” does an incredible job in breaking down the meanings of “preacher talk” and the attendant themes of classism within African-American politics, specifically the acceptable discourse of social mobilization — on what it means to “speak for the people” and how collective hopes can be distorted by individual shortcomings.

Excellent stagecraft implicates the audience in the drama as well. As one watches the play’s sufferers isolated in their spotlights, FBI agents ring the stage’s perimeter as co-witnesses, co-voyeurs.  One is reminded that, whether active or passive, no one is outside the story, and sometimes, your role is chosen for you.

“The Good Negro” plays through February 6 at the BCA’s Plaza Theater.

It’s not only the battle-scarred sky that will be violently forced to open. The characters in this gripping moral drama, while dressed like they’ve popped off of a Norman Rockwell cover, are as internally charged as the nimbus clouds that gather above them.

It’s 1947, the Second World War is over, the ticker-tape has been swept from the streets, and a generation of young veterans, with the aid of the G.I. bill, is struggling to settle down into comfortable lives. Excluding those like Larry Keller, who never returned.

Larry’s mother Kate, played by first-rate tragedian, Karen Macdonald, stubbornly insists that Larry is alive and will one day walk back into his childhood home. “Because it has to be.”

Meanwhile, Larry’s younger brother Chris, a tall, blond, athletic pillar of American idealism, played by Lee Aaron Rosen with the voice and bearing of an operatic tenor, is getting restless. Chris wants to marry Larry’s sweetheart, Ann Deever, played by Diane Davis with notes of Judy Garland.

A marriage of Chris and Ann would be shattering for Kate, who still believes Ann is destined for Larry—and this is not the only reason their love may prove star-crossed. Ann’s father sits moldering in prison for crimes that he still blames on Joe, the factory-owning patriarch of the Keller clan, played with truly impressive complexity and charm by Will Lyman.

Battle lines are drawn slowly during a first act, buoyed by humorous portrayals of the Kellers’ lurking busybody neighbors, like amateur astrologer, Frank Lubey (Owen Doyle) and domineering housewife Sue Bayliss (Dee Nelson).

When the second act rolls around, Ann and the Kellers will each be forced out of their shells, forced to take a moral stand and convince a scene mate of the impossible.  Each conflict forces a new moral question.

“All My Sons” is the fourth play in what the Huntington has called its “Season of American Stories.”  In many ways, it echoes the season’s premier, August Wilson’s “Fences.” While very different in rhythm and tone, both plays feature a charismatic father holding court over his backyard, who ultimately tests your loyalty and trust. Both explore strained families, and the way a father’s past can shape his son’s future. Both are excellent.

“All My Sons” plays at the B.U. Theatre through February 7.

She was brainstorming a way to use social media to promote “Gatz,” the current production on at their Loeb Drama Center, which presents the entire word-for-word text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby.” Presented in two parts, the play has a total runtime of about six and a half hours.

The idea: go small. On the stream @ARTGatz, they are presenting the full text of the novel via Twitter, one 140-character tweet at a time. As of this writing, the stream has 129 followers.

“One blogger’s headline about ‘Gatz,’” said Israel, “was ‘Not for the Twitter Generation.’ I think we may have proven him wrong here.”

ARTGatz followers can expect to receive a piece of the novel every 15-20 minutes, generally between the hours of 10am and 11pm “when users are most active,” Israel said. The stream is managed by an intern using a Twitter application which pre-programs tweets, a method Israel says she would never use for normal promotions but which may be the only practical way to execute this novel feat.

What can be gained by experiencing this great work of literature in a byte-sized digital format?

“I think people will gain an appreciation for the language,” said Israel, “and this is where the two concepts connect. It is about the language. Seeing one of the tweets come across your screen you realize just how poetic Fitzgerald’s text truly is.”

Certainly the punctuation of a tweet changes the aesthetic:

“Daisy was popular in Chicago. They moved w/ a fast crowd, all of them young&rich&wild, but she came out w/ an absolutely perfect reputation,” one tweet reads.

In some cases, the 140-character break simply cannot be completed neatly, as in, “If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: ‘Where’s Tom gone?’ and wear the mos (cont) http://tl.gd/1jfmc.”

But other times, breaking the text into epigamic or even haiku-like nuggets really does draw attention to the sharpness of Fitzgerald’s sentences.

“…and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over,” followed by, “Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver.”

It can emphasize the power of his imagery; “She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball…”; or his pearls of wisdom, “Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people,” informs one tweet, followed by “You can hold your tongue &, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody is so blind they don’t see or care.”

Toward the end of his career, Fitzgerald labored feverishly to write a commercial Hollywood film, the dominant popular art form of his time. His attempts floundered and he did not live to see a version of “Gatsby” grace the silver screen (it finally happened in 1974). Whether or not he would have been proud to see his words transmitted through Twitter is hard to say. It can safely be assumed, however, that leaning over his iPhone, martini in hand, a tweet or two at least would inspire the writer to “LOL.”

And you don’t need special glasses to see it in 3D.

In this American Repertory Theater event, broken into two parts that can be viewed in a single day or over two, the innovative New York-based company, Elevator Repair Service, is staging every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

Without spectacle, they tell you the story—and it’s riveting. Rather than touring you through one vision of “Gatsby,” what they offer is more like the endlessly yielding raw materials, with some guideposts, to make your own version along with them and a roomful of strangers.

“Gatz” is set in a dingy office/warehouse with outdated equipment. It’s an atmosphere familiar as a slaughterhouse of the imagination, but it will prove a useful place to think about the central questions of “Gatsby,” questions about the meaning and the power of wealth in America, about why we pursue it and what we come to think of those who attain it.

A conservative-looking office drone (Scott Shepherd) sits down at his desk and when his computer fails to switch on, he picks up a novel with which he seems unfamiliar, and starts reading it aloud.  At first his co-workers and even his boss (Jim Fletcher) try to ignore him. It’s as if he’s mumbling at his computer, or he’s left his radio on a touch too high—but slowly, subtly at first, as he gets more and more engaged in dramatizing the story with his voice, its elements start to take shape in the environment around him. Ever so casually, a supporting cast beings to materialize.

The result is an interlocking three-fold drama. There is Fitzgerald’s novel itself with it’s powerful rhythms, keen epigrams, rich imagery and dry wit, and there is the drama of our narrator coming out of his shell as he grapples with “Gatsby” for the first time.

Then, there’s the meta-drama. What is happening in this office? Are this man’s co-workers joining in his eccentric activity—or are we seeing the workings of his imagination, using the resources around him, discordant as they may at first seem, to flesh out the characters Fitzgerald’s words outline?

It’s a clever framework and keeps the play afloat. You can choose to focus on any of these dramas, or switch back and forth throughout the plays long run-time, and each is dynamic.

By the end, it is evident that our narrator is a changed man, in the way that anyone is changed after reading a rich novel, deeply. He is a man who has walked in Nick Carraway’s shoes. He’s traveled from the Middle West to the seat of power in the East, gotten mixed up in bonds and sloshed with the glittering and the sloppy. He’s ridden in fast-moving, poorly-steered cars and he’s navigated through poseurs, sodden impresarios, gangsters, athletes and beauty queens, into the thick of a noisy tragedy, and he has landed on the other side in a mood of grim contemplation, with a yarn that is unraveled but still fraught with tangles.

It is a long journey to take.  You will need stamina and resolve to take it with him. But “Gatsby” is, after all, a reflection and touchstone of the complicated American experience. It works well as a stage epic, especially told with so much humor, pathos, inventiveness, and skillful minimalism.

“Gatz” is directed by E.R.S.’s John Collins, with inspired sound design by Ben Williams, set design by Louisa Thompson, and lighting design by Mark Barton. It runs at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square through February 7.