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

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind
Written, Directed, Produced and Performed by the Neo-Futurists: Sharon Greene, Jacquelyn Landgraf, John Pierson, Caitlin Stainken and Jay Torrence
Created by Greg Allen
Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

If you have a taste for the tawdry, the kinky, the sweet and the sublime… this show’s for you.  Given its premise - 30 plays in 60 minutes, with new plays added and old ones dropped for each performance - you’d be tempted to want to say that the only constancy in the new Too Much Light is change.  You would, however, be wrong. Read more

Kimberly Gilbert

An interview with actress Kimberly Gilbert appearing in Woolly Mammoth’s production of Boom
by Joel Markowitz

Boom, the three actor Peter Sinn Nochtrieb comedy, shifts into high gear with the performance of Kimberly Gilbert. Read more

Boom

Boom
By Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Directed by John Vreeke
Reviewed by Tim Treanor

I have some bad news for you. In the next few months, or years, life as we know it apparently will end, courtesy of a major collision between Earth and a great big comet. Regrettably, the few survivors will include, not an overweight, balding theater reviewer, but a nerdy fish scientist named Jules (Aubrey Deeker) and the hyperkinetic journalism student Jo (Kimberly Gilbert) who the fates have appointed as his partner in the arduous task of repopulating the world. I have learned about these unfortunate events from a museum exhibitor named Barbara (Sarah Marshall), who, being from the future, has a little perspective on them. I am happy to report that museum exhibitors from the future are just as pleasantly neurotic as they are today.

Boom, a wickedly clever play set against a backdrop of mass extinction is, curiously enough, a comedy: Read more

MacHomer

MacHomer
by William Shakespeare, as modified by Rick Miller, channeling Matt Groening
directed by Sean Lynch
produced by WYRD at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
reviewed by Tim Treanor

In the middle of the stage, a huge knife suddenly materializes. It is shaped like a slice of pie and covered in blood. “Is that a dagger I see before me?” asks MacHomer (Homer Simpson (Rick Miller)). “Or…a pizza?” He seems to be right; the knife has turned into something out of Domino’s.  “Mmm…pizza.” Read more

Maria/Stuart

Maria/Stuart
By Jason Grote
Directed by Pam MacKinnon
Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Here is what happened, all those hundreds of years ago, as re-imagined in Friedrich Schiller’s play Maria Stuart: Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, is framed by a forged letter and executed for a treason she never committed, even though her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, knew that she was not guilty. Here’s what happens in the absolutely astonishing world premiere now playing at Woolly Mammoth: Stuart (Eli James) has had his romantic dreams sustained for his entire adult life by a letter which he hides in a bust of Friedrich Schiller - a letter which may have been forged. Read more

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