Paramount Theatre Archives - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

The White Card: An Attempt to Communicate

By Jane Baldwin | March 5, 2018

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. …

The Select: Stage adaptation of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises Shows Lady Brett Ashley As The Bright Light of the Show.

By Jane Baldwin | March 20, 2011

The Select, performed by the oddly named Elevator Repair Service, is a stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. Elevator Repair Service or ERS is a collaborative founded in 1991 with the aim of devising theatre pieces from non-theatrical material. In its early years, the company worked with found texts to create highly energetic, idiosyncratic shows. Of late, it has drawn its works from classics of American literature of the 1920s: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and now Hemingway.

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