The buzz about The Cake is that it attempts to humanize a cakemaker who refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, but it is different than that, and better. Bekah Brunstetter’s story, the only CATF production this year which is not a world premiere, instead explores what happens when the comfort of […]
Archives for July 8, 2018
Review: Memoirs of a Forgotten Man at Contemporary American Theater Festival
“Where does the past exist,” asks O’Brien, “if at all?” “In records,” replies Winston Smith. He is tied to a chair. “It is written down.” “In records. And–?” “In the mind. In human memories.” “In memory. Very well, then.” O’Brien is about to improve Winston Smith’s memory by having rats chew on his face. “We, […]
Review: A Late Morning [in America] with Ronald Reagan at Contemporary American Theater Festival
Has there been, in our lifetimes, a greater political enigma than our 40th President, Ronald Wilson Reagan? We saw him, as the public man, on our television screens for twenty-eight years: the nation’s grandpa, sweetly reasonable, soft-voiced, prone to sentimentality and foggy about the details. House Speaker Tip O’Neill called him “an amiable dunce”, and […]
Review: Berta, Berta at Contemporary American Theater Festival
There are two people on the stage in front of us – Leroy Grant (Jason Bowen) and Berta (the remarkable Bianca Laverne Jones), writhing in love and sorrow – but a third character hangs over them, patient and hungry. That is the character of Parchman Penitentiary, the massive Mississippi industrial farm which made substantial annual […]
Review: Andromeda Breaks at Capital Fringe
There are certain individuals who haunt the Capital Fringe festival (and I’m not talking about the reviewers). Antigone and Medea always seem to make an appearance. And, of course, every character from even the most obscure work of Shakespeare. But, thanks to the new Fringe Curated Series commissioning program, other mythical figures are having their […]
Review: O Monsters, Capital Fringe
What happens when a man and a woman love each other very much? In the case of O Monsters, they spend a glorious night together before the man disappears and leaves his lover (now pregnant) behind to raise their triplets in a sort of subterranean limbo, haunted by the specter of their disappeared patriarch. While […]