Jon Fosse’s Sea is a tricky play to connect with. Its inhabitants seem at times to be on a boat (“I am the Shipmaster!” one insists, over and over), but it’s clear early on that the setting’s a bit more existential than that. The play’s notes describe the journey as a “modern-day Hades” but purgatory […]

Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (trans. George Tabori) presents us with a familiar story: a churlish Chicago mobster slashes and wheedles his way to the top. This time, it’s the top of the city’s cauliflower game. In case that doesn’t ring a bell, Scena Theatre’s production offers up Brecht’s suggested projections, orienting […]

“Stay,” the dying beloved tells her lover, “where we were so long alone together. My shade will comfort you.” But of course he does not, and instead moves to a single room in a place where two rivers join to form a third. And from there he walks to the banks of the river and […]

You might call Scena director Robert McNamara’s Pinter Rep an arranged marriage of sorts – four short plays by Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter, the British playwright of such full length plays as Betrayal and The Birthday Party. Known for his staccato dialogue and ambiguous plotlines, these four works, One for the Road, Mountain Language, […]

Time has long moved past the actual date of George Orwells’ classic novel, 1984, yet the future it envisioned when written in 1948 seems more prescient than ever.

You know this girl, this woman, this ghost. You met her in Galway, or in a small town in the Slieve Mish Mountains in County Kerry, or in Peoria — or in Bowie, or in Rwanda, or any place in which she exists — which is to say, all places. She is Irish; she is […]