“Identity Crisis” Play Festival
by Toby Zinman
for the Inquirer
A smorgasbord approach to theater: Luna Theater Company’s festival offers 10 ten-minute plays all focused on the general theme of “Identity Crisis.” Ten playwrights, nine actors, five directors and four designers team up to create these quickies. The advantage of a smorgasbord is that you get to taste a little bit of many things; some you like, some you don’t.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
After fifty years, the Shaw Festival seems to be running out of steam; having committed themselves to plays by Shaw or written by others in his lifetime, or set in his lifetime (a lot of leeway there, 1856-1950), the Festival has to repeat and/or reach deep into obscurity. Shaw is a dramatist of specific social issues, as were many of his contemporaries; social issues change, but the plays don’t. Sometimes the relevance to the contemporary world is clear; for example, somebody spray-painted quotations from Shaw onto the pristine sidewalks of Niagara-on-the-Lake. One read: “Do not waste your time on social questions. What is the matter with the poor is poverty—what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.” As I stood copying this into my notebook, a cleanup crew arrived to water-blast it away.
It says something about economic times and theatrical tastes when of the eleven shows in the festival, there are only two by Shaw (Misalliance and The Millionairess) and even more telling is that the highlight of the five productions I saw is the musical RAGTIME. Directed by the Festival’s Artistic Director, Jackie Maxwell gives this story about the promise of America, a strong, moving and full-throated production. Ragtime is based on the novel of the same name by E.L. Doctorow, with a book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. The lives of three families are entwined: a prosperous white family (Mother is played beautifully by Patty Jamieson), a rags-to-riches immigrant family (Jay Turvey is Tateh), and a black family (Thom Allison’s Coalhouse Walker is the deep and thrilling center of the show). Ragtime both evokes the atmosphere of the early 20th century and gives us contemporary relevance—exactly the combination we hope for.
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
It's such a pleasure to watch a production make something more of a play than seems possible. Two actors -- Kash Goins and Roderick Slocum -- are doing just that in Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks' 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning play about two African American brothers living on life's underside.
I've never been much for the play, which is too long in the first act at four substantial but realistic scenes, and becomes less believable in the two-scene second act, when family revelations -- and hints at family revelations -- seem to come pretty late in the game.
But under Malika Oyetimein's precise and thoughtful direction, this Topdog/Underdog, on Walnut Street Theatre's fifth-floor stage, is both fluid and fluent.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
If you don’t come out of the Walnut Street Theatre humming these days, then you just don’t hum at all. For me it was “That’ll Be the Day,” but then I turned to “Peggy Sue,” which will still be in my head next week this time, the way these things go.
The Walnut’s new main-stage show is Buddy -- The Buddy Holly Story and what you see in that title is precisely what you get — both the everyday and quirky stuff about the short life of the singer-composer who was instrumental in creating and delivering rock and roll to a nation of teenagers who craved the new music.
His songs, with simple lyrics and effusive melodies, are as catchy today as they were more than a half-century ago. At the Walnut, where most of the talented cast is its own the on-stage orchestra, the show is a remarkable display of acting, singing dancing and musicianship, all rolled into the one.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, is about a real island in South Africa, the site of a notorious prison. If you’ve been there you know how stark and oppressive Robben Island is, despite its having now become—merely, happily— a tourist site. Nelson Mandela, among thousands of others, was imprisoned there under the grim laws of apartheid and participated in the events the play recounts. Fugard, long admired as the courageous theatrical spokesman for human rights in his native country, gives us just a glimpse of what it must have felt like to be trapped—physically and psychologically—in South Africa.
By Wendy Rosenfield
FOR THE INQUIRER
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By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
From the get-go, you know you’re into a bizarre tale with John Guare’s Are You There, McPhee?, a world premiere that opened Friday at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre. Its narrator, a playwright, tells acquaintances that he has a story about an inexplicable event in his life that involves abandoned children, a porn ring, a sea monster and Walt Disney.
And so he begins the story, which sounds compelling at its start. But the tiresome Are You There, McPhee? turns out to be a saga without substance, a piece that combines elements of the real and unreal with little effect.
McPhee is, at root, about a playwright who rejects an invitation to Nantucket to see an amateur group perform his single masterpiece called The Internal Structure of Stars. The thespians have found this work to be life-changing, and the playwright’s rebuff has infuriated them. It comes back to haunt him when he’s forced to visit Nantucket in 1975, the same summer that Jaws was the on-screen blockbuster.
Jaws figures highly in McPhee, maybe because its success so clearly overwhelms the playwright’s, maybe because of the way it captures the nation, maybe because the shark is a metaphor for ... many things.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The thought, sound and rhythm of Khalil Munir’s hour-long theatrical memoir called 1 pound 4 ounces are delivered not just in well-considered words but in the taps on his shoes.
Munir, a Philadelphian in his late 20s, uses those taps to accentuate his story. You can hear them running, or making as heart beat, or shooting a gun.
His show through Sunday at New Freedom Theatre is an evolving version of the one he takes to schools and community groups, directed here by veteran theater artist Johnnie Hobbs Jr. and beautifully complemented by the cello work and side-stage dialogue of musician Monica McIntyre.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Robin Hood stands at the edge of Sherwood Forest, strumming what looks like a lute gone angular, and lamenting “Marian, I love you, girl!” For a second, he’s a lounge lizard in the present while his 12th-century honey languishes in a tower run by the Sheriff of Nottingham, who has a modern flair for corruption and an old-fashioned snarl.
That mix of eras is a creamy-smooth blend in the Arden Theatre Company’s production of Robin Hood, which runs through June 24 and continues the company’s current rollout of high-level theater aimed at kids. This is a Robin Hood for times old and new — you could find something like Rosemary E. McKelvey’s costumes at a Renaissance Faire and also at the Gap.
The British theater artist Greg Banks wrote this adaptation about the folkloric archer who had his own notion of wealth redistribution. The Arden’s associate producer, Matthew Decker, who also is cofounder of Theatre Horizon, stages Robin Hood to take maximum advantage of Tom Gleeson’s set — a large playground with a ton of recycled tire chips painted green for the dirt flooring, and monkey bars, climbing frames and the like for the forest. Robin Hood is a highly physical production.
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.
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