There’s an old logic puzzle about a farmer trying to get a wolf, a chicken, and a pile of corn across the river, but the farmer can only take two at a time in his boat. Leaving the wrong combination of items alone will end in something getting eaten. So in what order does he […]
Review: The House on the Hill at Contemporary American Theater Festival
There are stories we must approach carefully, as we might, unarmed, approach a wolf in a leg trap. Amy E. Witting’s wolf of a story, The House on the Hill, is such a tale. It is a story of the hate that dare not speak its name. It is a story of sin, and the […]
Review: Thirst at Contemporary American Theater Festival
I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, Albert Einstein once said, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and rocks. It is after the war now. The great cities are gone, and the networks which kept us alive and healthy are in disarray. Once we dreamed of […]
Review: The Cake at Contemporary American Theater Festival
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 […]
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 […]