There are white people all over the place. The ones whose dilemmas we observe in J.T. Rogers’ remarkable play are Martin (Kurt Zischke), a Brooklyn lawyer brought in to run a St. Louis  law firm, Alan (Lee Sellers), a New York professor with a burgeoning interest in Peter Stuyvesant, [Read more...]

“Words, words, words,” Hamlet sneered at Polonius, who had asked him what he was reading, but to Alida (Helen-Jean Arthur), a brilliant writer now in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, they are the guideposts which will keep her memories aglimmer even as her synapses misfire. They are, to the fiercely independent and private Alida, the equivalent of Gretel’s breadcrumbs: a device to keep wicked forces at bay, and to show the way home. [Read more...]

The best play of the Contemporary American Theater Festival 2009 is about your marriage – and mine, and every marriage, young or old, gay or straight, where the partners have, for better or worse, given their souls to each other for safekeeping. [Read more...]

To Ray (Anderson Matthews), the Yankee Tavern is a place where everybody knows your name — and your Social Security number, the names of your sex partners, and your precise DNA sequencing, thanks to tiny devices that “they” set up, [Read more...]

By: Debbie Minter Jackson

Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV July 13, 2006

Why, oh why has it taken me sixteen years to finally get to Shepherdstown, WV for the Contemporary American Theater Festival, which started the same year I moved here from Chicago? I have heard rumblings about it since its inception, so I had No excuse – reasons, sure, but no excuse. My reasons started with two little letters that implied unreachable distance, unknown parts waaaaay over the river and across mountains somewhere out yonder-WV. For some pathological reason, I was averse, okay, terrified, of crossing the Potomac into West Virginia on my own. This year I had fortification-fellow sisters of the Black Women Playwrights’ Group. We packed our bags, grabbed that highway, and in just shortly over an hour we were in Shepherdstown for an invigorating line-up of new plays. What an inauguration to what I am publicly announcing will be an annual pilgrimage for me. Sometimes, you just need a little nudge, okay, for me maybe a push, a hand, or even a kick to get me off my couch.

[Read more...]