Paulina Guerrero is the choreographer for the tenth year anniversary of suicide.chat.room, opening this week at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Guerrero joins us to talk about the differences of building this remounted production from a script versus from scratch, and how her movements affect the overall story. This expands on our talk with Taffety Punk […]
Taffety Punk’s restages suicide.chat.room. For Marcus Kyd, it’s very personal.
Marcus Kyd has two résumés (acting and directing) and a music catalogue. This may not sound special until you realize that both résumés, filled to the margins with production credits, do not contain overlapping credits. As a co-founder for Taffety Punk, Kyd keeps himself busy, and consistently in a state of creation with the other […]
Review: Antigonick and The Fragments of Sappho from Taffety Punk
“how to translate [Antigone]?”, Anne Carson self-reflexes in her translator’s note to the Sophokles classic. “I take inspiration from John Cage who, when asked / how he composed 4’33”, answered / ‘I built it up gradually out of many small pieces of silence.’” I begin with the translator because Taffety Punk’s double feature of Antigonick […]
Review: Pramkicker at Taffety Punk
Once upon a time, there was a woman named Jude who kicked a pram (a baby carriage). An empty one, don’t worry, but nonetheless Jude has to complete an anger management program to avoid charges, and Taffety Punk’s US premiere production of Sadie Hasler’s play (following Fringe runs in Edinburgh, London and Oslo) is about […]
Tonya Beckman is a sultry, playful Don Juan in Taffety Punk’s production (review)
Molière’s Don Juan—the 17th Century tale of a rakish nobleman whose insatiable libido and incorrigible charm lead him from town to town, deceiving (and deflowering) damsel after damsel to his ultimate doom—is nothing if not timeless. And (dare we say) timely in the #metoo era. Yet Taffety Punk Theatre Company keeps it light and playful […]
Side Effects, a doctor struggles to survive in an unforgiving heath care system (review)
Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s new rep of healthcare plays—Mercy Killers and Side Effects, both written and performed by Michael Milligan – tackle the broken nature of America’s healthcare system—supposedly the greatest in the world. Side Effects focuses on the less-often-considered side of the doctor-patient divide—that of the burned-out physician, equally frustrated and thwarted by a broken system […]
Mercy Killers shows the human toll of a broken healthcare system (review)
“If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that,” playwright Tom Stoppard once said. “But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.” So, it’s a credit to Taffety Punk Theatre Company that their new rep of […]
Phaeton from Taffety Punk (review)
Taffety Punk has a bit of an odd premiere on their hands. Phaeton is filled with loveless marriage, questions of faith and faithfulness, young adults trying to find their way in the world, and much more. Which all seems normal enough, especially told through some stellar acting and design. The play also happens to include angry […]
The Top 10 Realest Theater Awards You Won’t See at the Helen Hayes
1. Most Emotionally Devastating Deaths by Inanimate Objects in A Play – Famous Puppet Death Scenes – Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Feel free to kick yourself if you missed this horrifyingly hilarious (or hilariously horrifying?) series of vignettes with various topics like domestic abuse, ecological disaster, failed romance, and German children’s television, but one commonality. […]
Inheritance Canyon, far-out scifi at Taffety Punk (review)
When my husband, Donald MacLennan, a brilliant physicist whom I adored, passed away in 2014, I decided to renew his subscription to Physics Today. I felt his presence guiding my hand as I made out the check and mailed it. I’m glad now that I did.
Shakespeare’s “bad” quarto by Taffety Punk hailed the best Hamlet (review)
Taffety Punk’s Hamlet, the First Quarto is the Bard’s masterwork as you’ve never seen it before. At least probably. The Punks’ new production grows from their experimental Bootleg series (which is a treat; held every year at the Folger Theatre), where they performed the first quarto of Hamlet (hence Q1), sometimes called the “bad quarto,” […]
The Devil in His Own Words
We love to see the Devil on stage because – let’s be honest – he’s the character who is most like us. When he shows up in our stories, it is always with a wounded sense of entitlement. He has a contract, signed – in blood – by some hapless sap with poor impulse control. […]
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