Category: All the world’s a stage

Not by Bread Alone: The Nagala’at Acting Ensemble Company, World’s only Professional Deaf-Blind Theatre Company at ArtsEmerson

Not by Bread Alone: The Nagala’at Acting Ensemble Company, World’s only Professional Deaf-Blind Theatre Company at ArtsEmerson

By |

bread_2

Photo: Avshalow Ahraron.

Not by Bread Alone may be the most unusual theatre experience I have ever undergone. It is a devised piece created by the professional director Adina Tal and the blind and deaf members of the Israeli Nalaga’at Acting Ensemble Company, none of whom had ever appeared onstage before undertaking Light Is Heard in Zig Zag, first performed in 2004 after two years of rehearsal. The Nalaga’ at, whose name means Do Touch, is the world’s only professional deaf-blind acting troupe.

Light Is Heard in Zig Zag, attempted to bring the spectators into the performers’ world, i.e., a world of only three senses. The company’s talent and the work’s uniqueness made it a success that prompted the group to develop their second production, Not by Bread Alone. The eleven performers and their director built on the techniques they had acquired during their first undertaking.

…

Read More Read More

A Whale of a Plot: Samuel D. Hitner’s Show at Boston’s SpeakEasy

A Whale of a Plot: Samuel D. Hitner’s Show at Boston’s SpeakEasy

By |
The Whale Photo
John Kuntz and Georgia Lyman. Photo Credit: Craig Bailey.

Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre is currently presenting the New England premiere of Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, winner of the prestigious 2013 Lucille Lortel Award.

The play revolves around Charlie, a solitary, secluded, cetaceous-like character, set on gorging himself to death. The reasons for his behavior remain unclear, even mysterious, until the play’s end. Charlie’s days are spent mostly sitting on a sprung sofa, enveloped in a huge sweat suit, gasping as he munches away. The slovenly stage and the space beneath are teeming with remnants of food packets.

…

Read More Read More

‘Midsummer Night’s Dream : Nap time at the Cutler Majestic

‘Midsummer Night’s Dream : Nap time at the Cutler Majestic

By |

OnemidsummerMSND(2) Photo Credit Simone Annand.    David Ricardo-Pearce as Oberon.

Reviewed by Jane Baldwin

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now playing at Boston’s Cutler Majestic is the second show produced by the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in collaboration with the South African Handspring Puppet Company. The first, The War Horse, adapted from a children’s novel was a renowned prizewinner dominated by its large and beautifully choreographed puppets.

Shakespeare’s play is directed and choreographed quite differently, conceivably because of the stylistic incongruities. The romantic comedy takes place in three different realms: the world of the rich and powerful, fairyland and its magic, and the laboring class. Like most of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, it is convoluted, revolving around three seemingly separate but related plots. To further complicate matters, many of the roles are double cast so as to accentuate similarities rather than variants. Theseus, the Duke of Athens and Oberon, the king of the fairies are both played by David Ricardo-Pearce while Saskia Portway enacts the Duke’s wife-to-be Hippolyta and Titania, the Queen of the fairies.

…

Read More Read More

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

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

By |
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. …

Read More Read More

Mary Prince

Mary Prince

By |

mary_prince_serieuse_bis (1)Mary Prince
Mise en scène d’Alex Descas
Interprétation de Souria Adèle
Traduction et adaptation d’Emma Sudour et Souria Adèle.

Le paradoxe de ce monologue intense entre deux acteurs caractérise cette production de Mary Prince, le récit d’une femme esclave, originaire des îles anglophones de la Caraibe qui raconte la lutte pour son émancipation à partir du moment où elle arrive en Angleterre. Premièrement, il y a Souria Adèle, la comédienne qui incarne Mary Prince. Son jeu nous fait oublier le personnage comique créé par Mme Adèle (Marie-Thérèse dans Négresse de France) la femme flamboyante « au gros bonda » qui faisait rire les salles entières à Avignon. Mary Prince partage la scène avec le metteur en scène l’acteur Alex Descas (sa première mise en scène d’ailleurs) pour transformer cette rencontre avec la comédienne en véritable dialogue d’acteurs qui trahit un échange chargé d’émotion sur la manière de capter ce personnage, sans nous faire patauger dans le misére pathétique. Mary Prince est, après tout, une femme très forte et la comédienne saisit cette force tout en insistant sur un jeu intériorisé, un ton sobre et un corps presque effacé. Dans cette ambiance de lecture extrêmement raffinée, Mary Prince s’épanouit lentement, doucement et avec beaucoup de pudeur puisque le metteur en scène a pu se se mettre dans la peau de cette esclave qui aborde le récit de sa vie dans tous les détails les plus douloureux les plus honteux, les plus intimes . …

Read More Read More

: The Color Purple

: The Color Purple

By |

An Engaging, Entertaining, and Thought Provoking Musical

purple_08Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre has a winning production in The Color Purple, the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize novel. Director Paul Daigneault mounted an energetic, exciting, and even stirring show with a talented cast of singers, dancers, and actors. While the presentation is powerful and follows Walker’s storyline, Marsha Norman’s sanitized and simplified adaptation lacks the depth of the original text.

The play begins in the early twentieth-century South and follows the life of Celie a poor, rural overworked, victimized black woman, understandably lacking all self-confidence and hope. Raped by her stepfather, she has her first child at age 14 and another soon after. He takes the babies from her and only years later does she discover that they are alive and secure. Her mother dead, her babies gone, Celie’s only friend and confidant is Nettie, her pretty, bright younger sister. The stepfather gives the hard-working Celie (along with a cow) to a brutal man she refers to as Mister and who, in turn, abuses her and drives away Nettie with his sexual advances. Alone, with no one to love and no one who loves her, Celie confides in God through letters, the narrative device for the book and, to a degree, the musical. …

Read More Read More

MIes Julie at the Boston ArtsEmerson: Passion, Violence and Love in Post-Apartheid South Africa

MIes Julie at the Boston ArtsEmerson: Passion, Violence and Love in Post-Apartheid South Africa

By |

MiesJ

Photo by Roger Bosch. Bongile Mantsai as John and Hilda Cronje as Mies Julie

Mies Julie, director and playwright Yaël Farber’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, is a striking piece of theatre, which retains the basic plot, principal characters, and many of the ideas of the original, while transposing it to a very different world. Strindberg’s nineteenth-century Miss Julie takes place on a Swedish estate on Midsummer Eve, a time of unbridled fun, one which creates a space for the brief affair between Julie and the valet Jean.

…

Read More Read More

La Loi de Tibi: L’éveil des damnés de la terre par la Cie parisienne l’Autre Souffle

La Loi de Tibi: L’éveil des damnés de la terre par la Cie parisienne l’Autre Souffle

By |

tibi-1024x721

La Loi de Tibi, de Jean Verdun, traduit en anglais en 2003. Adaptation, interprétation et mise en scène de Jean-Michel Martial avec Karine Pédurand, collaboration artistique de Sophie Bouillot. Une production de la Cie l’Autre Souffle, Paris. 

Depuis Avignon, sur la scène de la Chapelle du Verbe incarné  (2013), on parle de l’excellent jeu de Jean-Michel Martial. Cet espace à Avignon,  intime et  chaleureux,  convenait parfaitement  à l’œuvre de Jean Verdun (Mieux que nos pères, 2001) devenue Tibi’s Law dans la traduction de Robert Cohen , jouée en 2003 aux États-Unis.  La troupe française (la Cie l’Autre Souffle),  a gardé la version américaine du titre car il recèle quelque chose de biblique qui rehausse les propos du personnage quasi shamanique de « Tibi »

…

Read More Read More

Visage de feu au Périscope: flambée onirique

Visage de feu au Périscope: flambée onirique

By |
Réjean Vallée (le père), Joanie Thomas (Olga), André Robillard (Kurt) et Diane Losier (la mère) dans Visage de feu. Photo by Gilles Landry
Réjean Vallée (le père), Joanie Thomas (Olga), André Robillard (Kurt) et Diane Losier (la mère) dans Visage de feu.
Photo by Gilles Landry

Critique par  Joanne Desloges.

(Québec) Montée en 1999 par Thomas Ostermeier, qui signait le mémorable Un ennemi du peuple au plus récent Carrefour international de théâtre de Québec, la pièce Visage de feu a été traduite et modelée par le Théâtre Blanc, qui nous offre une adaptation québécoise qui s’annonce aussi surréelle que percutante.

L’objet théâtral est entre les mains de Joël Beddows depuis quelques années déjà. Le metteur en scène et directeur du Département de théâtre à l’Université d’Ottawa a accroché autant sur la forme que sur le fond du texte de l’Allemand Marius von Mayenburg, auteur, dramaturge et traducteur depuis près de 15 ans pour la Schaubühne, compagnie dirigée par Thomas Ostermeier à Berlin.

Visage de feu relate l’éclatement d’une cellule familiale, mais aussi d’une société post-industrielle où la famille, le temps, l’espace individuel sont en mutation. Deux adolescents, Olga et Kurt, un frère et une soeur, se révoltent contre la cage dorée aux barreaux extensibles où leurs parents, surtout leur père, les maintiennent depuis l’enfance. …

Read More Read More

Tribes at Boston’s SpeakEasy: Thought Provoking Play Packs Emotional Wallop

Tribes at Boston’s SpeakEasy: Thought Provoking Play Packs Emotional Wallop

By |

doubletribesGetAttachment.aspx Photo: Craig Bailey. Erika Spyres and James Caverly.

Nina Raine’s Tribes, currently playing at Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre, is a powerful drama whose plot revolves around Billy (James Caverly), a deaf young man whose dysfunctional family is in denial about his deafness. Under the guise of helping Billy experience a richer life, his overbearing father (Patrick Shea) discouraged him from learning sign language. The scheme backfires with Billy living on the fringes, even in his own home, unable to fully comprehend what is going on, despite his ability to lip read.

…

Read More Read More