The mark of a superb theatrical production lies in its ability to astonish us even after we’ve been saturated with reports of its power. News of an audacious version of J.B. Priestley’s 1945 An Inspector Calls reached these shores soon after director Stephen Daldry revived it in London in 1992…
Penis envy may be ludicrous. The analyst’s couch may be passe. Still, there’s no eradicating the imprint Sigmund Freud’s theories of personality have left on our collective psyche in the last 100 years. Through his writing and research, Freud popularized dream interpretation, recognized infant sexuality, and acknowledged the wounds we…
Stand-up comic Jeff Garlin learned how to make people laugh from the bathtub. As a toddler, he cracked up his parents by filling a plastic toy with water and announcing that it was “concentrated.” He garnered even more chuckles with words such as girdle and Jamaica. A shtick that only…
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde touched a collective nerve when it was first published in 1886. The provocative story of a scientist who unleashes the darkest parts of his nature by drinking an elixir spawned its first staged version the following year,…
Imagine an ethnically mixed inner-city neighborhood devoid of drug deals and drive-by shootings. Older residents leave their apartments without fear of getting mugged. Young black men are not harassed by police. And every morning in this urban enclave a Jew, a Chicano, and a black man gather in a corner…
You may not know that the 1966 musical Man of La Mancha takes place in a prison cell during the Spanish Inquisition. You may not know that the play’s main character is Miguel de Cervantes, the sixteenth-century Spanish author who wrote the masterpiece novel Don Quixote. And you may not…
In his elegantly directed production of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life, director Rafael de Acha tellingly gives Cole Porter the last word. As the lights dim at the end of this wistful comedy, “Begin the Beguine” drifts over the sound system at New Theatre in Coral Gables. Porter’s rhapsody to romantic…
Relationships between mothers and daughters are never simple. Whether they lean on each other, dominate each other, envy each other, criticize each other, reject each other, or seek each other out, mothers and daughters find themselves enmeshed throughout their lives. The dramatic possibilities in such attachments have not been lost…
On the surface, Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaption of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 An Enemy of the People seems theatrical proof of the French adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Set in a nineteenth-century Norwegian town, the drama’s subject matter mirrors headlines in the 1990s: poisoned…
Blaine Dunham began her career in theater down by the docks in Coconut Grove. Now 23 years old, the two-time Carbonell Award-nominated actress and artistic director of Lunatic Theatre Company arrived in Miami at the age of 6, making a dramatic entrance by sailing into the Grove’s Dinner Key Marina…
“Look at that woman,” muses Hattie, as she watches a contestant dressed in a chicken suit lose everything during a rerun of Let’s Make a Deal. “Disappointment is carved on her face.” Of course, Hattie (Meredith Marsuli), a character in James McLure’s one-act comedy Laundry & Bourbon, has already seen…
First came the innovative 1976 novel by the late Argentine writer Manuel Puig, followed by his 1981 stage adaption. Then came director Hector Babenco’s much-ballyhooed 1985 film. A musical rendition flopped when presented by New Musicals at SUNY Purchase in upstate New York in 1990; however, when resuscitated by the…
We live in an era of easy confession, a time in which stories of abuse and neglect make the rounds of talk shows, support groups, and the evening network news programs. Because we’ve grown accustomed to the public disclosure of personal trauma, the plays of Tennessee Williams, often structured around…
There’s a whole lot of ranting and raving going on these days over at Area Stage on Lincoln Road. Alan Bowne’s Beirut, an unnerving nightmare about a not-so-distant future in which HIV-positive people are quarantined in warehouses on the Lower East Side of New York City, plays in repertory with…
Imagine two straight upper-middle-class white couples on the deck of a Long Island beach house. Chloe Haddock pushes food on everyone, peppers her speech with badly pronounced French, and sings the wrong lyrics to show tunes. Her husband, John, completes the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink and lusts…
Remember letters? I don’t mean bills, sales flyers, or computer personalized sweepstakes packets. I mean envelopes addressed in ink, sealed with wax or scented, filled with news of family, tales of travel, or words of love. I mean savoring the written voice of a friend, hearing their inflection in your…
In 1989, Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road was an empty strip of vacant stores, a shell of the lively outdoor mall filled with elegant shops that thrived in the 1940s and 1950s. With serendipitous foresight, John and Maria Rodaz of Area Stage Company rented an affordable storefront there, then set about…
Like the school year, vacations, and marriages, theater seasons kick off with anticipation, fueled by promises of pleasure, fulfillment, and growth and driven by unarticulated fantasies that, in theatrical terms, look like this: An inspired melange of classic, contemporary, and cutting-edge work with tickets priced at the cost of an…
In the 400 years since Shakespeare entertained Elizabethan England with histories, tragedies, and comedies, his works have been updated, translated, elaborated, extemporized, bowdlerized, and set to music and dance. Macbeth went sci-fi. The Merry Wives of Windsor outwit Falstaff in 1950s suburbia. Women played Hamlet. And a Wild West version…
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie has evolved into an American classic since its debut on Broadway five decades ago. In addition to stage productions and film and television versions, the play has found its way into high school and college literature anthologies as a progenitor of contemporary American drama, with…
We can measure how far American culture has come since social satirist Lenny Bruce challenged the proprieties of the 1950s and 1960s by noting that New Times can print the word cocksucker and no one’s going to get hauled off to jail on an obscenity rap. Cocksucker. In October 1961,…
If a typical Elizabethan theatergoer time-traveled to an evening of contemporary American drama, she would find herself astonished at the passivity of the audience. Modern viewers have been trained to behave. We watch the proceedings on stage politely, applauding with enthusiasm if the production enthralls us, applauding out of obligation…
