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By: Tim Treanor   Fanny’s First Play - WSG

The stage can be a forum for ideas. A socially conscious playwright, if he is clever and sensitive, can use his art to present his solutions to the great social dilemmas of his day. Throughout his lengthy career, George Bernard Shaw exploited that theatrical potential as well as any playwright in history.

So the question confronting producing companies in 2006 is this: is there any reason to stage a ninety-five-year-old Shaw play today? Fanny’s First Play, which was first produced in the same year Ronald Reagan was born, shows Shaw as a cuddly curmudgeon, taking broad potshots at 19th-century British concepts of class and respectability. Does this justify a revival?

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By: Ronnie Ruff   God Of Hell - Didactic Theatre 

Adrienne Nelson and Colby Codding, photograph taken by Elish Healy

Sam Sheppard’s latest play is a sarcastic look at the nationalistic^* themes promoted by the current administration or to quote the playwright “a takeoff on Republican fascism.” A comedy in three scenes, the play uses more red, white and blue than the Republican National Convention. Ceramic republican elephants, vinyl banners, flags, patriotic neck ties, all with the stars and stripes and all being waved about with enthusiastic abandon.

Frank and Emma live in dairy land, Wisconsin that is, where Frank tends to his cows with a love only equaled by his feelings for Emma or maybe not, now that I think about it. The cows are number one on Frank’s priority list. The couple have a visitor as the play unfolds, and old friend of Frank’s by the name of Haynes is hiding out in the basement after a little accident at his job that may or may not be a plutonium spill. “Do you know what plutonium is named after, Frank?” asks Haynes, who produces vicious blue electric sparks when touched. “No-what?” answers the clueless dairy farmer. “Pluto-the god of Hell,” Haynes says. “Oh,” says Frank, “I thought he was a cartoon.” Now we all know the Feds are not going to let poor Haynes get away so easily — they send a schizoid agent posing as a cookie salesman to the farm to bring him back into the fold. Peddling red, white and blue iced cookies, our man Welch, part salesman, part flag waving super agent, is there to provide containment for this uncomfortable situation that has been deemed problematic by the government. Welch has his way with everyone’s mind like bird the flu in a hen house. When Emma asks: “What does that mean, ‘our government’?” and Frank answers “That means he knows more than us – he’s smarter than us – he knows the Big Picture, Emma – he’s got a plan” we understand that this is great stuff.

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By: Tim Treanor          Jvlivs Caesar at Caesar’s Palace, presented by Vpstart Crow

There are a thousand things wrong with this misconceived and poorly-executed production, beginning with the theme. There is no imaginable reason to place Julius Caesar in Caesar’s Palace, except as a play on words. But where does this lead us? Hamlet in a hamlet? King Lear in a Lear jet? MacBeth in a McDonalds?

I mean, whose idea is this? At the opening of the show, we are on the floor of Caesar’s Palace. We know where we are because we have been told by Marc Antony, in a speech in which he also told us to turn off our cell phones and devices of recording. It looks, however, like a VFW Hall on Mardi Gras night. Brutus (Jay Tilley) and Cassius (Terry Spann) are bellowing at each other about some bit of corruption by one of Cassius’ followers. We are not at the familiar opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but deep in the fifth Act, where, unbeknownst to us, the assassination has already taken place and Brutus and Cassius are already at war with Marc Antony.

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