By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The prolific Philadelphia playwright Bruce Graham must be leading a charmed life. In a matter of months, The Outgoing Tide, his funny and searing exploration of dementia and its effect on a family, has been given not one but two terrific productions here.
The first was in Center City in the spring, at Philadelphia Theatre Company. The second now plays in Wilmington, where Delaware Theatre Company takes The Outgoing Tide — with its perfect narrative arc, smooth writing, and genuine tone — and runs with it in a production directed by Broadway producer Bud Martin, in his first season as artistic director in Wilmington. He had been running Act II Playhouse in Ambler.
Martin assembles a formidable cast: Peter Strauss (TV’s Rich Man, Poor Man and others) as Gunner, the salt-of-the-earth retired owner of a Philly trucking firm, who lives down the Shore with his wife, played by Michael Learned (The Waltons, Nurse). Ian Lithgow (a recurring role in 3rd Rock From the Sun) portrays their adult son, in the middle of his own divorce problems while he’s being confronted with those of his parents.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Mamma mia! Ladies, wazza-matta you? Ufff! Is this any way to behave in the kitchen? That flour’s not for throwing. That ladle’s not for bashing. And ... yikes! ... put down th ose guns!
Hey, waidaminit! Are you really ladies, ladies? Let alone sisters? I don’t think so. It looks like the frumpy one who calls herself Delphine is a guy named Jay Falzone, and the one called Carmela who thinks she’s super sexy, she’s really Stephen Smith.
Ooops, I hope I haven’t given anything away.
By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
On the speaking circuit of 19th-century America, no one commanded greater audiences than Mark Twain. Just as Charles Dickens mastered the format across the pond in England, the author of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer crisscrossed the country, reading his books to sold-out crowds.
Wendy Bable’s Mark Twain: Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburgers builds on this historical fact. She set her play in 1904, the self-proclaimed last lecture of Twain first annual final farewell tour. This introduction sets the tone for the evening: a bit whimsical, with a hint of Twain’s sardonic, bubble-bursting humor. People’s Light and Theatre Company’s production offers a bit of the same: an enjoyable and educational means to expose kids (nine and up, at least) to both reading and live performance.
By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
Women in Shakespeare’s day weren’t allowed to perform on stage. In Quintessence’s production of the Bard’s Othello, director Alexander Burns won’t let them play either.
At first glance, it seems an odd choice. The central plot revolves around Iago (Josh Carpenter), an ensign passed over for promotion by his capricious Moorish general Othello (Khris Davis) in favor of pretty-boy academic Cassio (Daniel Fredrick). Othello’s marriage to the fair Desdemona (an excellent Ross Bennett Hurwitz) adds race-baiting and sexual jealousy to this triangular conflict.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Seventy scenes. Three hundred lighting cues. Ninety minutes. Four terrific actors.
An offstage voice murmurs: “Scene One: Go” and Jeffrey M. Jones’ Seventy Scenes of Halloween begins. It will continue with seemingly randomly numbered scenes (“Fifty-four: go,” Thirty-six: go”) to scare and amuse us. Director Aaron Oster has arranged this fragmented plot so cleverly that while we’re busy trying to piece the story together, we discover it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it usually does. There are many tricks and many treats in this nifty production by Luna Theater.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The history play RFK, which opened Saturday in Center City, is special in several ways. It has a rare quality for a one-person play because it operates through two acts that feel genuine, not like the usual forced conversation with unearned extremes. RFK also puts us easily into another era — and in this production, with time-machine force.
And it’s exceptionally performed, by Russ Widdall, the co-artistic director of New City Stage Company, the play’s producer. Widdall does not look like Robert F. Kennedy, the man he inhabits for two hours, but he sounds and moves like him — or at least like the general memory of him, which for an audience is as good as the real thing.
The force of Widdall’s performance, though, comes not from the way he carries himself or appears — it’s because of the passion he gives Kennedy or maybe, he appropriates from Kennedy. Either way, at RFK you’re in for a portrayal that comes across as genuine and straightforward.
By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
Director Brenna Geffers showed a bit of boldness when casting only women in EgoPo’s The Assassination of Jesse James. Running into traffic is also bold, though not without consequence.
Geffers script consists of text found in dime novels, poems, songs, and newspaper accounts about the legendary outlaw. The play, itself a collage of direct address narrative, dramatization and song, chronicles James’ (Melanie Julian) transition from guerrilla fighter slaughtering Union forces to stage coach robbing bandit.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
From: Mr. Sherlock Holmes
To: Dr. Watson
I say, my dear Watson, we can make immediate deductions from our visit to Sherlock Holmes and the Crucifer of Blood at the indubitably pleasant Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley — you know, just down the lane from the county town they call Media.
First off, the play by Paul Giovanni — the same one that featured Glenn Close as the female lead on Broadway in 1978 and Charlton Heston as myself in that 1991 telly-movie — is loose as the ashes in my pipe bowl. It’s based, somewhat, on Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel about our exploits, The Sign of the Four, and liberties were taken.
By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
It was only two hours until Wednesday night’s presidential-race debate, and another political debate was just beginning on the stage at Plays & Players Theatre, where the six cast members of This Is the Week That Is had declared themselves undecided voters, and set out to explore the issues.
And what an exploration it is! I’ve seen many versions of 1812 Productions’ annual This Is the Week That Is, a satire on news and life in general, and this year’s “Election Special” is the funniest and meatiest I can recall. It brings much needed balance to this election year — two-plus hours of laughter, and I mean some big ones, skewering the race for the White House.
So if you’re a political junkie — or if you just need a break from all the real health-care/Medicare/Social Security/job-creation/sour-economy chatter — this is for you.
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
Religion—not intellectual theological debate—but old-time, fundamentalist, burn-in-hell, get-down-on-your-knees evangelical preachifying is a tricky topic for a play. Especially a play written by a fundamentalist Christian from Idaho which won an Obie in New York.
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 written 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 serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from 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 spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
