Andrew Child - Page 7

Sitting down to chat with Shear Madness' creators Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan provides exactly what one might expect from a conversation with two inherently funny people who, 40 years ago, produced a murder mystery/ improv comedy at a little theatre in Boston that currently holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-running play in United States history.

In order to write about Open Theatre Project's 7th Annual Slam Boston (a series of home-grown 10 minute plays hosted at Boston Playwright's Theatre), one must first open up the discussion of the 'D' word. That's right, Boston. Let's talk about that 9-letter word that not only kills in Scrabble, but also purports to have the mystical power of selling tickets, encouraging productive conversation, and absolving institutions of the need to engage with their more inherently exclusive practices. Diversity.

In two recent reviews of The Magic Flute and Fences, I have bemoaned Boston theatres' lack of accommodation made for the marginalized communities they attempt to serve. In sharp contrast,Tempest Reconfigured, a project produced by Fort Point Theatre Channel, takes the storyline of Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest and centers the perspectives of richly disparate voices from Boston's artistic communities. Producer Marc S. Miller explains that the idea behind the project was to invite community-based arts groups to respond to, reinterpret, reinvent, subvert, and analyze the themes from Shakespeare's text. The result is a communal evening, part performance, part ritual, that transforms Boston Public Library's stoically academic Rabb Hall into a place of wonder, beauty, anguish, and catharsis, not unlike the fictional island which Prospero and his daughter Miranda inhabit in the play. 

When I first saw Boston Lyric Opera's promotional images for Fellow Travelers, a new opera by Greg Pierce and Gregory Spears, in a production that premiered at Minnesota Opera, I was incredibly wary. Photos of conventionally attractive white men in their boxers clinging to each other in a fit of passion next to images of an un-subtle cross forebodingly hung on a stage used to advertise an opera (the art form relied upon to convey narratives of lovers separated by tuberculosis, conquests by Valkyries, and murders outside of bullfights) feels like an equation for overbearing reminders of overwrought queer storytelling tropes. My assumptions were proven resoundingly incorrect by what may well be the classiest gay porn to mask itself as high art since the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was completed in 1541. Based on Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel of the same name, Fellow Travelers tells the story of an ill-timed affair between government employees Timothy Laughlin and Hawkins Fuller during the 1953 Lavender Scare, in which Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 required the firing of over 5,000 queer, ostensibly queer, or queer-adjacent government workers.

The Umbrella Stage Company has baptized their newly renovated blackbox with an appropriately bleak production of August Wilson's Fences. The play is the third installment in Wilson's American Century Cycle, for which he wrote 10 plays about the Black American experience, one play per decade in the twentieth century. Fences is arguably the most successful and most frequently produced, having secured the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play along with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and inspiring a 2016 movie adaptation which was nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, among others. We follow the story of Troy Maxson, a city sanitation worker whose aspirations for anything beyond driving a dump truck have abandoned him, and his family. The play relays a narrative which explores the intricacies of familial relationships in the quotidian as well as within a crucible of infidelities, deceit, and betrayal.

The crotchety, old ushers at Emerson's Colonial Theatre prepared for battle as the two night run of John Leguizamo's Tony Award winning Latin History for Morons descended upon their gilded palace. The bawdy irreverence of the piece with its marked disdain for the systemic white-washing of American history draws an audience that is ready to laugh riotously at commentary on shared pain, jeer at mentions of oppressive forces, and cheer at the slightest acknowledgement of their heritage (utterances of 'Puerto Rico' and 'Columbia' drew equivalent reactions from the crowd as mentions of 'Boston'). As non-traditional theatre audience members (read as: people of color, people who like fun things, etc.) flocked en masse to see the acclaimed voice actor behind the lisping sloth from the Ice Age movies, tensions were palpable. Ushers raced about the theatre, continuing the never-ending Stanford Prison Experiment of commercial arts by exerting their authority over the crowd, but not even their hyper-vigilance could dampen spirits as a master entertainer worked the house.

ArtsEmerson continues its tradition of hosting world-class theatre pieces in Boston by presenting Isango Ensemble's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. The troupe, comprised of 21 black South African musicians, alternates nebulously between delivering recitative, dancing ebulliently, and playing marimbas, rawhide drums, and an eclectic mix of instruments in the on-stage orchestra. Upon entering the Cutler Majestic, the fusion of cultures is jarringa?'- an exposed stage behind an opulent proscenium arch is interrupted by simple structures of distressed wood and corrugated steel panels. The (predominantly white) audience is immediately won over by the novelty of hearing Mozart's iconic overture played entirely on wooden marimbas. The expertise of the musicians in questiona?'- as percussionists, vocalists, actors, dancers, et. ala?'- is reason enough to reserve tickets, and as the novelty of hearing western music arranged on djembes and glass bottles wears off, the precision of the performances continues to impress.

Praxis Stage's Coriolanus is punk. It is metal. It is what too many theaters in Boston try to be and it succeeds in ways that should have the rest of the theatre community taking notes (or at least scrambling for tickets to their next production). Coriolanus is a late Shakespearean tragedy  that follows the downfall of a Roman warrior whose aggressive nature and volatile temperament make him an unfit political leader. The show is a success because of the evidently uninhibited passions of the artists involved and the ability of the co-directors, Audrey Seraphin and Daniel Boudreau, to effectively act in accordance with their purported philosophies and priorities.

Roald Dahl wrote books for the children of his time and it is a wonder that many of his creations have remained as popular and well-loved as they have decades after his death. Although James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Witches, and The Twits can all trace thematic influence back to Dahl's involvement in World War II, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seems to be the most heavily-informed by an unquestioning devotion to western industrialization and hope for the germinating seeds of our present-day capitalism. The 1971 movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is indicative of its time not only in its psychedelic colors and film effects but in its Vietnam-Conflict-era praise of Americanized consumerism. While Tim Burton's 2005 film adaptation reclaimed the title of the 1964 book and attempted to be a more faithful translation, its darkness and sterile settings have not garnered the cultural embrace of its predecessor, mainly because (I believe) of the public's common, shifting relationship with and disdain for industrialization and capitalism.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is alive and well at the Huntington Theatrea?"resuscitated beyond the didactic philosophy with which the text is too often approached in academic settings and fully breathing as the comedic bacchanalia of narcissism and self-introspection that Stoppard engineered. The play obsessively examines the tribulations of two ill-fated, minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, taking the audience on a stroll through the minds of fictional men who seem to realize, not only that they exist within a play, but that they merely exist within that play so that something bad may happen to them. The audience joins the two as they pass the time, waiting for whatever is cominga?? to come.

Upon entering Chelsea Theatre Works for Actors' Shakespeare Project's King Lear, the audience is immediately immersed in a world that could be passed off as Laurie Anderson's riff on 'man cave'. An eclectic installation of vintage desk lamps and exposed light bulbs pulsate, casting shadows over a pile of radio transmitters, a neglected piano, and an assortment of discarded knick knacks that set designer Jon Savage has seamlessly incorporated into the deep-stained wood encircling the playing space. A vintage projector noisily clicks through slides edited by Cameron Willard showing images of monkeys in cages, minarets of mosques, and landscapes of deserts as David Reiffel's vapory soundscape throbs in the air. When Robert Walsh stumbles in barefoot as King Lear, it is apparent to whom this space belongs.