Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s Shining City raises a question about our demons: do we make them up to punish ourselves, or do they exist outside us in the world? For most of the play, the answer seems to be that we are haunted by our actions and their repercussions, the gravest of which may come […]
Nancy Robinette, the Meryl Streep of Washington theatre, grants a rare interview.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Nancy Robinette told me as we sat in a small pie shop down the block from The Atlas Performing Arts Center. We spoke a couple of hours before she was to do a preview of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett and about an hour after I spoke to […]
Beckett’s Happy Days gets first-rate staging by SCENA
“Every word,” Samuel Beckett once wrote, “is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” In Beckett’s Happy Days, Winnie (Nancy Robinette) proceeds at a rate of about sixty stains per minute, and for good reason: without her words, the silence and nothingness would win.
Silent Partners at Scena Theater
Verfremdungseffekt translated from the German is estrangement effect and it is one of the defining principles of Epic Theatre, the stage theory Bertolt Brecht wanted audiences to realize. He wanted them to distance themselves from the production.