Author: Jane Baldwin

Jane Baldwin, a longtime faculty member of the Boston Conservatory, taught Modern Drama, Acting, and Humanities. She is a recipient of the Canadian Heather McCallum Award for the best English essay and the French language Prix André G. Bourassa. Her books and articles include Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor (Greenwood Press), Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style and Other Writings, which she edited (Routledge Press), and Vie et morts de la création collective/Lives and Deaths of Collective Creation, co-edited with Jean-Marc Larrue and Christiane Page (Vox Theatri). Her essay, “Michel Saint-Denis: Training the Complete Actor,” is published in Actor Training, ed., Alison Hodge (Routledge Press). Her latest work, “The Accidental Rebirth of Collective Creation: Jacques Copeau, Michel Saint-Denis, Léon Chancerel, and Improvised Theatre” appears in Toward a New History of Collective Creation, eds., Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proudfit (Palgrave). Although most of her reviews are from the Boston area, she has followed the Stratford Festival in Canada for many years.”
Jagged Little Pill Finds a New Life

Jagged Little Pill Finds a New Life

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Jagged Little Pill    Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

“Jagged Little Pill,” Alanis Morissette’s internationally famous alt-rock album released in 1995 has been turned into exciting musical theatre with two new songs composed for it. Imaginatively directed by the American Repertory Theatre’s Diane Paulus and stunningly choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the performers sing, dance, and act with skill. At the opening, two bands roll on stage. A thirteen person chorus sings and dances to the music before pulling a screen open exposing the Healy living room. This chorus functions much like its ancient Greek predecessor.

The book written by Diablo Cody revolves around the Healys, an affluent family living in a wealthy suburb in Connecticut. Each family member has a secret. Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley), a stay at home mother, is writing a Christmas letter in which she explains that she had a bad automobile accident followed by two operations, but is now fully recovered – a lie. Her husband Steve (Sean Allan Krill), involved with his work life, is seldom at home. …

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The Women Who Mapped the Stars: The Struggle to be Acknowledged

The Women Who Mapped the Stars: The Struggle to be Acknowledged

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Sarah Oakes Muirhead
Photo: A.R. Sinclair

The Women Who Mapped the Stars is a new work by Joyce Van Dyke, a rising dramatist with several awards to her credit. Her three previously produced plays also focus on women’s lives. When The Woman Who Mapped the Stars opened at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, her fifth piece premiered in New York.

The play tells the story of five of the women “computers” who worked at the Harvard Observatory beginning in the late nineteenth century. This was a period in which great strides were being made in astronomy with the aid of better telescopes and the invention of the camera. Professor Edward Charles Pickering who headed the observatory without sufficient funding decided he needed more help in collecting data, i.e. to study the photographic plates and compute the properties of the stars. In order to save money, he hired his maid, Williamina Fleming (Becca A. Lewis), a hard-working Scottish woman. Since she proved herself capable of dealing with the “boring” side of the work, he decided to employ more women, paying them half the salary a man would earn for the same task. …

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The White Card: An Attempt to Communicate

The White Card: An Attempt to Communicate

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The White Card 
photo Gretjen Helene

 

 

The White Card, Claudia Rankine’s play on racism is having its world premiere at Boston’s Paramount Theatre as a coproduction with Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre. Rankine, a celebrated modernist poet, created the drama to bring the ideas of her prize winning Citizen, An American Lyric to a medium where dialogue is most often the means of communication.

 

As is frequently the case in plays that involve disagreement between characters, a dinner party plays a prominent role in The White Card. At the opening of this two scene piece, Virginia (Patricia Kalember) and Charles (Daniel Gerroll), a wealthy white middle-aged married couple who live in a luxurious New York apartment, are talking with Eric (Jim Poulos), a white art agent as they await Charlotte, an African American artist. Charles and Virginia want to purchase one of Charlotte’s works. …

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Rude Mechs’ Experiment with Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov

Rude Mechs’ Experiment with Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov

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Rude Mechs,  Photo:Joan Marcus

Rude Mechs, an Austin-based ensemble in their twenty-first year of collective creation, recently appeared at the Yale Repertory Theatre.  As is their  wont,  Rude Mechs’  production is a reshaping of a work whose ideas, characters, potential for humor and updating appealed to the group. Consensus is de rigueur in the running of this company. …

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Proof, an authorial dispute: Performing plays that bring a new understanding to science.

Proof, an authorial dispute: Performing plays that bring a new understanding to science.

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Proof. Photo C.T. Sinclair

 

Proof, David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, now being presented by the Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, MA, is in theory about the world of mathematics. However, presumably influenced by Auburn’s lack of knowledge of the topic, this four-hander explores family problems and clichés about mathematicians rather than mathematics. …

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Road Show: Another Stephen Sondheim Work at the Lyric Stage

Road Show: Another Stephen Sondheim Work at the Lyric Stage

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The Road Show,  Photo:Maggie Hall

Spiro Veloudos, the producing artistic director of Boston’s Lyric Stage, has long admired the work of the prolific composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. During his twenty years at the Lyric, he has directed at least eight of Sondheim’s musicals. Veloudos’ latest, Road Show, which he co-directed with choreographer Ilyse Robbins has a somewhat checkered past.

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Ada/Ava: Silent Film in the 21st Century

Ada/Ava: Silent Film in the 21st Century

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AdaAva_3LD   Photo  Yi Zhao

 

ArtsEmerson is dedicated to bringing compelling and experimental theatre from all parts of the world to Boston. On January 10, Manual Cinema, a company that devises works that cross the line between cinema and theatre brought Ada/Ava to ArtsEmerson’s Paramount Theatre.  First produced in 2013, Ada/Ava is the second full-length production by this young Chicago collective of five. Since then they have added three more productions and become known in the US and abroad. …

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The State of Siege (l’état de siège): A political warning

The State of Siege (l’état de siège): A political warning

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État de siège
État de siège, Photo de Jean Louis Fernandez

Albert Camus’ 1948 play The State of Siege (L’État de Siège) is presently touring the U.S. in a production by Paris’ celebrated Théâtre de la Ville. This is the company’s third visit to this country, but its first to Boston where it opened on November 9 at ArtEmerson’s Majestic Theatre.

Camus was invited to write the play by the actor and mime Jean-Louis Barrault then also France’s leading director. As early as the late 1930s, Barrault began developing ideas for a drama based on the plague. At first, he collaborated with Antonin Artaud whose interest lay not in dialogue, but in creating a powerful theatre of ritual, imagery, and movement which ultimately through assaulting the audience’s senses would have a cathartic effect. The two men split up because Artaud’s ideas were too extreme for Barrault and the converse was true for Artaud. …

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The Revolutionists: How far have we come?

The Revolutionists: How far have we come?

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The Revolutionists. Photo A. R. Sinclair

The Revolutionists Photo A. R. Sinclair

The Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, MA is currently presenting The Revolutionists, a work by Lauren Gunderson that takes place in Paris during the Reign of Terror (1792-1793), a period of the French Revolution during which the leaders of the new government took revenge against those viewed as anti-revolutionists. The situation worsened when the government split into two factions, the Jacobins and Girondins. Of the two the Jacobins were the more vicious. Arrests, quick trials, and the guillotine were the order of the day. …

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: An Intense and Moving Theatrical Experience

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: An Intense and Moving Theatrical Experience

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photo: Nile Hawver-Nile Scott Shots

The 2015 Tony Award winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time now playing at Boston’s SpeakEasy Company was adapted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon’s bestseller of the same name. It is a very imaginative theatrical play where what is seen is as important as the words heard.

It revolves around Christopher Boone, a high functioning mathematically gifted autistic fifteen year old boy who lives in Swindon, England. Although the word autism is never mentioned, his behavior and the production make his problems clear. Given that he prefers his own company he does not socialize with people. As a result, he is extremely naïve about the way the world functions. He cannot bear physical contact with people. Even his parents are allowed only to reach out a hand and touch Christopher’s hand while he stands at a distance. However he has a pet rat he cares for tenderly. He dreams of becoming an astronaut, a profession where he could be alone and fly towards the planets. …

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