Month: February 2014

House/Divided: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession

House/Divided: From the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Jess Barbagallo, Sean Donovan, Josh Higgason, LaToya Lewis, Matthew Karges, & Moe Angelos. Photo Credit: James Gibbs
Jess Barbagallo, Sean Donovan, Josh Higgason, LaToya Lewis, Matthew Karges, & Moe Angelos.
Photo Credit: James Gibbs

House/Divided at ArtsEmerson

House/Divided is a politically leftist work, part docudrama and part story, devised by the Builders Association, a long-term collaborative based in New York, which has toured worldwide. ArtsEmerson presented House/Divided at Boston’s Cutler Majestic from January 30 to February 2.

The intermedial production makes use of yesterday’s scrims and today’s screens as well as live and recorded music. Almost nothing has solidity, not even the house that is “built” at the production’s start and remains center stage in various iterations as a symbol of the events taking place.

House/Divided juxtaposes the Great Depression and the Great Recession. The 1930s scenes, with dialogue and narration drawn from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, focus on the Joads’ loss of their house and farmland, followed by their desperate journey from Oklahoma to California in the hope of finding work.

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Seeds: A play with a Haunting Challenge

Seeds: A play with a Haunting Challenge

Liisa Repo-Martell and Eric Peterson, in Seeds. Photo: Guntar Kravis
Liisa Repo-Martell and Eric Peterson, in Seeds.
Photo: Guntar Kravis

Seeds
By Annabel Soutar
A production of Porte Parole Theatre
Presented at the Frederick Wood Theatre, Vancouver, as part of the PuSh Performing Arts Festival, January 2014.

Seeds plays at the National Arts Centre, English Theatre from March 6 to April 12, 2014.

In the world of documentary theatre Seeds may reign supreme as one of the most complex topics ever incubated for the stage. The story is one well suited for the headlines-as-dialogue, taunt teaching moments, and characters-as-points of view form of theatrical presentation docudrama uses to construct its world. The little guy – and they don’t get much smaller than the individual farmer – is suddenly and it would appear unjustly targeted by a multi-national corporation because their genetically modified seeds have capriciously settled on his land producing a crop resistant to the weed blasting properties of Round Up herbicide. That’s the simple plot.

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Perfect Wedding: Imperfect Wedding and Production

Perfect Wedding: Imperfect Wedding and Production

PerfectWeddingPoster

Perfect Wedding
By Robin Hawdon
Kanata Theatre

Farce must move quickly to amuse, but the early frenzy and constant shouting throughout the Kanata Theatre production of Perfect Wedding by Robin Hawdon are likely to leave audiences with headaches rather than smiling faces.

First-time director Geoff Williams has chosen to have his cast begin at too high a pitch to have anywhere to go. In addition to the corkscrew of frenzied action, repeated movements, looks and voice cadences and the regular brandishing of a toilet brush increase the predictability and reduce the watchability.

The starting point of Perfect Wedding is the morning after the bachelor party, when the reluctant groom wakes up in the bridal suite to find a naked woman (a complete stranger) beside him. Whoops! His bride and her mother will arrive momentarily, expecting to use the room to change for the wedding.

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Insignificance: A play with some significance

Insignificance: A play with some significance

 

CST-Insignificance-3The Nora Theatre Company is presently performing British playwright Terry Johnson’s Insignificance at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In residence along with the Underground Railway Theatre at the up-to-date, attractive, and flexible black box playhouse, the companies have an affiliation with the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, located nearby. The affiliation includes a mandate to produce works of scientific interest whenever possible. Insignificance falls somewhat awkwardly into this category given that the theory of relativity is connected to the storyline.

Insignificance makes use of a familiar plot device seen in such plays as Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, in which notable twentieth-century personages are juxtaposed in unlikely circumstances. Here, the locale is a mid-level New York hotel room, the time 1953. The brightly colored baby blue room has two doors, one stage left which leads to the corridor; the second, stage right opens into a bathroom unseen by the audience – a common farcical set up. Scene designer Brynna Bloomfield further accentuates the impression that we are about to watch a Feydeau-like farce by placing a large bed downstage.

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