The Last Cargo Cult

No man is an island, but Mike Daisey’s pretty close. Booming furiously from behind a large table, visible only from the waist up, he seems less a man and more some sort of severe tectonic event Read more

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

Quick. You have exactly one hour. How do you use it?

You could run two loads through the washing machine (boring). You could make five dozen batches of Minute Rice (excessive). Read more

Full Circle

Don’t even bother asking the box office where your seat for Full Circle is located. “General Admission” doesn’t begin to describe it. Under the collaborative hand of director Michael Rohd, the creative team has remade Woolly’s entire facility into a roaming mirage of 1989 Berlin. Read more

Full Circle cast talks about Woolly’s moving production

During a dress rehearsal for Woolly Mammoth’s Full Circle, actor Michael Willis nearly tripped headlong over an audience member. The audience member wasn’t up on stage; Willis, like the rest of the cast, was in the audience.

“Suddenly we’re mixing the environments,” said Willis, who managed to make it up a staircase in time for his next line. “So the space becomes a very real world.” Read more

Eclipsed

Another day comes, and the war drags on. Insects buzz. Trees sway. Distant rifle shots patter through the heat waves. Inside the compound, sunshine strikes corrugated metal walls, slicked with iridescent chemicals and punched through with bullet holes. Read more

Fever/Dream

Playwright Sheila Callaghan gives us an hilarious play that pops the American corporate blimp. In director Howard Shalwitz and this superlative Woolly Mammoth production, Read more

Antebellum

Playwright Robert O’Hara’s Insurrection: Holding History was one of the most intriguing and provocative shows we saw last year. Can Woolly Mammoth’s production of his new work, Antebellum, hold a candle to it? A candle? My God! It can hold the whole burning city of Atlanta to it! Read more

Hell Meets Henry Interview

Hell Meets Henry Halfway’s Pig Iron Theatre Company is not from Hell, but they are from Philadelphia…more specifically, they emerged from Swarthmore College, where they studied under Allen J. Kuharski, now the company’s dramaturg. Pig Iron’s been heavily influenced by the work of master clown Jacques Lecoq and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, but their approach is also relentlessly verbal and theatrical.

How does it work? DCTS Editor Lorraine Treanor asked Dito van Reigersberg, a Pig Iron co-founder, who plays the titular Henry in the show currently running at Woolly Mammoth. Here’s what he had to say: Read more

Hell Meets Henry Half Way

Hell Meets Henry Halfway
From Possessed, by Witold Gombrowicz
Adapted by Adriano Shaplin in collaboration with Pig Iron Theatre Company
Directed by Dan Rothenberg
Produced by Pig Iron Theatre Company at Woolly Mammoth Theatre
Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Don’t listen to the hype! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! This is no academic exercise, no somber meditation on the Art of the Clown. It’s spooky, shocking, and damn funny! It’s like Jean-Paul Sartre retold by Mel Brooks, and then performed by the Marx Brothers. It is a tragedy blown up a hundred times into a melodrama, and then blown up a thousand more times into a farce. Read more

How Theater Failed America

How Theater Failed America
Written and Performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Reviewed by Tim Treanor

I have no idea how theater failed America. Neither does anyone else I know, including Mike Daisey.  He does have a clear-eyed view of the scope of the problem: brilliant performers forced to sell office furniture to make ends meet; diminishing and increasingly geriatric audiences; huge schlocky productions featuring Actors Who Have Been on TV. The stabs he makes at identifying the problem’s source, however, fall short. Read more

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