by SOPHIE KERMAN Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” were certainly ground-breaking in 1996, but the contemporary conversation about gender – and all the many fluid forms it may take – makes Ensler’s focus seem a bit narrow. After all, some people have no particular affinity towards their vagina, while others ardently wish that they had…
by SOPHIE KERMAN The program for Savage Umbrella’s latest production, Care Enough, cites quotes from Vaclav Havel, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Cat Power (among others) as the play’s inspiration. If that does not immediately seem like a red flag to you, let me explain why it should. Works like Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Memorial Day weekend might officially kick off the wedding season for most of the population, but for same-sex couples in most states, all those weddings are just a reminder of one way that their love can not be legally recognized. And despite all of the political rhetoric about rights and principles,…
By ANNA ROSENSWEIG “A woman playing a woman. What’s the trick in that?” So wonders Edward Kynaston, a star of the London stage in the 1660s most renowned for his skill playing female roles. Kynaston has good reason to cast aspersions on the idea of women playing women, as his fame and fortune threaten to…
by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner (directed by Penumbra Theater’s Lou Bellamy) tackles faith, poverty, racism and sexism in a superbly acted ensemble performance at the Guthrie Theater’s Wurtele Thrust Stage through June 17. The beautifully rendered 1950s Harlem neighborhood set comes alive immediately upon entering the theater, with assorted street characters wandering on and off stage…
by SOPHIE KERMAN When it comes time to justify their work, the testimony of an artist speaks to much more than simply the words on the page. Although Are You Now or Have You Ever Been… is framed around Langston Hughes’ 1953 hearing in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it is not Hughes’ sympathies…
by CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE Fairy tale adventures, good versus evil and self-empowerment are the allegorical threads woven into local playwright Kira Obolensky’s Vasa Lisa, a highly entertaining play presented by Ten Thousand Things Theater at the Open Book (8:00 p.m. every Fri., Sat. from May 4 until May 13). Just in time for Mother’s Day, the play ultimately celebrates…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Whether because of the country’s harsh climate or its historically significant peasant population, the Russians certainly know how to deal with life’s hard knocks. Even the relatively privileged characters that inhabit Anton Chekhov‘s The Three Sisters do not have it easy. In many ways, The Three Sisters is all about the inevitable compromises we make –…
by MIRA REINBERG Long before Elizabethan comedies of error and late medieval or early modern French farce there was a genre of popular comedy that we recognize as the picaresque novel or “story-telling.” The earliest and rare example of such a picaresque tale is a second-century AD novel by Lucius Apuleius, entitled The Golden Ass,…
By CHRISTINE SARKES SASSEVILLE Learn to be Latina at the Mixed Blood Theatre throws political correctness out of the window and presents the notion of “palatably ethnic” entertainment to post-9/11 audiences. In the hysterical comedy written by Enrique Urueta and directed by Mark Valdez, the Lebanese-American heroine, Hanan Mashalani, played charmingly by Jaime Elvey in…
