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A  Little Bit of This…A Little Bit of That…

It’s been a while (5 weeks to be exact) since we’ve last schmoozed, so let’s catch up.

Lion in Wait with The Pillow Brothers

March went out with a scary roar as I sat down to podcast the Pillow Brothers-Aaron Munoz and Tom Story who were scaring the livin’ daylights out of a buried alive little girl and grossed out audiences at Studio Theatre inThe Pillowman.

But even scarier than the show was the story Tom Story told me and Lorraine Treanor about a near fatal attack by a leopard which almost had a Story buffet. The story really hit the spot.  I’m not lion. It’s scary. (more…)

By Chris Stezin

Produced by Charter Theatre

Reviewed by Debbie Minter Jackson

Plastic model body parts dangle from the ceiling in Chris Stezin’s Sleeping and Waking.   The off-putting display is a constant reminder that the play’s protagonist, Sullivan, well played by Ian Le Valley, is the first successful full body transplant.  Mind you, the play is set sixty years into the future when such biological feats matched the technological advances to make them a reality.  ”These are not my hands.” Sullivan says at the top of the show. Thus begins his quest, wrestling with questions about his own identity, his relationships, and even his faith, now that he’s attached to a different body. (more…)

By Will Eno

Produced by Catalyst Theater Company

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

The reviewer plops heavily into his chair and fires up his Dell.  He types in the basics.  Playwright’s name.  Producing company.  His own name.  He takes a pull from the glass of tawny port he had just poured and sits back.  He wishes he had one of those orange jellies with the chocolate on it.

“Will 2007 be remembered as the year that Washington theaters decided to add value to their productions by giving their audiences two plays in one?” he writes.  “With She Stoops to Comedy, In on It, and now The Flu Season, it seems to have become standard to have plays about playwrights writing a play.” (more…)

Interviewed by Joel Markowitz with Lorraine Treanor

Broadway musical performer Carolee Carmello is the much acclaimed star of Signature’s Saving Aimee. Carolee tells us how she came to be offered the role of Aimee Semple McPherson, her most enjoyable and most apprehensive moments in the play, thoughts on rewrites and hopes for the future of the show. Her husband is Gregg Edelman, also a successful Broadway performer.

How do they juggle two busy careers, home and children? Listen in.

Time: 0:16:23

 

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Adapted by Liza Lorwin from the play and novel Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Produced by Ms. Lorwin and Mabou Mines for Arena Stage

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Something very unusual is happening on the Kreeger stage.  I don’t mean the story, which is one of the world’s most familiar.  Rather, that the avant-grade theatre troupe Mabou Mines and the incandescent Karen Kandel are reinventing the very grammar of storytelling in order to open up Peter Pan’s melancholy heart.

To say that they tell it with Bunraku-style puppetry is to immediately relegate it to the world of the fey or the exotic, so let’s not call them puppets.  Instead, let’s say that Peter, Hook, Smee and the lost boys are what we always knew they were - figments of Mrs. Darling’s desperate imagination.  One “terrible Friday” she came home with her husband from a dinner party to see her three children silhouetted against the sky with another boy, whom she called “Peter Pan”.  By the time she was into the house, they had winked out of existence. (more…)

By Howard Walper, Steven Gottlieb, and Andrew Lloyd Baughman

Produced by Landless Theatre Co.

Reviewed by Janice Cane

Renaissance, now making its debut in the black box at D.C. Arts Center, is by all means a play that makes you think. Throughout the one-act show, I felt introspective: “This play poses several interesting, provoking questions. What are my own personal answers to them?” Until the very last moment, when I was forced to ask a very different question: “What were the playwrights thinking?”

(more…)