by MIRA REINBERG Living in Western countries generally implies having access to a vast array of media venues that provide an abundance of uncensored and updated news. Journalism is charged with the sacred task of unveiling democracy’s biggest enemy: collaboration of institutions in repressing crime, corruption, and injustice. It is not at all certain that…
by MIRA REINBERG That the vibrator gained wide and accepted usage to treat hysteria in women during what is considered one of the most demure of social ages – Victorian times, is a historical reality brimming with irony and asking to be dramatized in theatre. Playwright Sarah Ruhl put history into literary action in In…
By MIRA REINBERG “Why are wicked men such good company?” This question, asked in The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen by Six Elements Theatre playing at Gremlin Theatre, has clearly attracted playwright John Heimbuch, who has offered us a tale that does much more than provide an answer. Early eighteenth-century London is the setting…
By MIRA REINBERG There is nothing like the subject of women’s suffrage to remind us that society’s historical memory is exceedingly, perhaps alarmingly, short, and consequently that each battle for the recognition and institution of a fundamental human political right needs to be fought anew, in a Sisyphean enterprise of selecting the most efficient tactics.…
By MIRA REINBERG Some of playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s most refined plays contemplate the conjunction of history and literature. Such was the exquisite screenplay of Dangerous Liaisons, which brought to life the cynicism and manipulation of life in eighteenth-century French court and pushed its travesties to the limit. Likewise, his adaptation of Atonement dramatized…
By MIRA REINBERG Audiences and readers of Samuel Beckett have long since become aware that of all the different nuances that the playwright attributed to the meaning of responsibility, Beckett has never deemed it his task to attenuate the gravity with which he beheld life. He doled out his views of the absurdities and ruthlessness…
by MIRA REINBERG Nature smiled upon Public Dreams Theatre’s opening of The Tempest and the pastoral scene at Matthews Park in Minneapolis was not suggestive of the stormy intrigue of sorcery and vengeance that was to follow. Nor was there any set on the grass awaiting the audience with allusions to a tale of shipwreck…
By MIRA REINBERG Western audiences have been indulging in farcical sketches since the times when the classics of tragedy were being performed in Greece although most extant manuscripts date to the Middle Ages. Undoubtedly the magnetism of farce derives from the genre’s capacity to cast an oblique look at the chain of circumstances that generate…
By MIRA REINBERG The common dictum of the romantic comedy genre is premised on the boy meets girl situation, an encounter which necessarily engenders altercations and misunderstandings culminating in some composition of accord and communion. In some ways Phoenix, written by Scott Organ and presented by the Anchor Theatre Collective, adheres to the prevailing schema,…
by MIRA REINBERG How are we made aware that the uniform and prosaic image of a “production line” folds within itself elements of priceless nuance? Can the indistinguishable members of a column of dancers challenge the impression that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Thirty seven years and 6,137 Broadway performances…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 