With the COVID virus so pervasive in Palm Beach County, surviving the shutdown dictated by the pandemic is foremost on the minds of area theaters. But the next priority, artistic directors say, is putting an added emphasis on diversity – in their programming and casting. Most theaters think they have done a pretty good job at diversity, but agree there is still room … [Read more...]
Zoetic triumphs with powerful ‘American Son’
Lawyer-turned-playwright Christopher Demos-Brown, a co-founder of Zoetic Stage, is one of the area’s most prominent dramatists. That status took a quantum leap upward when this South Florida favorite son took his ripped-from-the-headlines play, American Son, to Broadway in late 2018. While some of the reviews were brutally negative, the production managed to play 97 … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks, April 21-22
Film: Veteran British filmmaker Mike Leigh is known for his low-key, low-budget contemporary tales of the politically downtrodden, but his latest, Peterloo, breaks from that mold with an epic history of a Manchester massacre in the summer of 1819. That is when armed forces on horseback charged into a crowd of 60,000 demonstrators out for electoral reform, killing 15 of them and … [Read more...]
Close to perfect ‘Fences’ stuns at Dramaworks
William Hayes has long wanted to produce August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences, but felt he had to wait until Palm Beach Dramaworks was capable and ready to take on such a challenge. Boy, is the company ready now. Onstage through April 21 is a virtually perfect rendering of Wilson’s 1950s play in his 10-play cycle that charts the evolving black experience … [Read more...]
Dramaworks does its first August Wilson, taking swing at ‘Fences’
In its 18 years of producing great American plays, Palm Beach Dramaworks had never done one by August Wilson, but that is not veteran local actress Karen Stephens’ fault. She had long been lobbying for his 1987 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, Fences, the tale of former Negro League baseball player Troy Maxson and his uneasy relationships with wife Rose and son … [Read more...]
Actresses make ‘Having Our Say’ an unmissable conversation
With presentational monologue plays – either one-person shows or sweet duets like Emily Mann’s Having Our Say – the question usually comes to mind, “Who are these characters talking to?” But in the case of Sadie and Bessie Delany, two centenarian African-American sisters who break the theatrical fourth wall from the start of their rambling, but endearing verbal tour of … [Read more...]
‘Having Our Say’ offers powerful history, rebuke for our present
Actresses don’t usually like to reveal their ages, but we can assume that Avery Sommers and Karen Stephens are younger than 103 and 101, the ages they play in Having Our Say, the oral biographies of Sadie and Bessie Delany at Primal Forces theater in Boca Raton, beginning Jan. 11. The Delanys were two African-American sisters whose century-long lives span the … [Read more...]
Skilled Dramaworks cast energizes undemanding ‘Golden Pond’
More so than most plays that have been adapted into movies, On Golden Pond has been under the shadow of its popular 1981 film. Not only did it win Oscars for stars Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, but the father-daughter conflict at the work’s core mirrored that of Fonda and his own daughter, Jane. Perhaps that is why Palm Beach Dramaworks attempted to distance itself … [Read more...]
Multi-racial ‘On Golden Pond’ aims to be about story, not skin color
At Palm Beach Dramaworks, the cast of Ernest Thompson’s popular 1979 play, On Golden Pond, is multi-racial by design, but director Paul Scancato (Collected Stories) does not want you to focus on that aspect of the production. “For me, it’s ultimately about telling the story of the Thayers,” he says. “The audience might initially think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be … [Read more...]
Gregory’s ‘Motherland’ compelling, but lacks Brecht’s weight
As Constable Dogberry once observed, “Comparisons are odious.” So do what you can to resist pitting Allison Gregory’s new work, Motherland, in your mind against the play that inspired it, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. The former, a contemporary tale of a wily, maternal ghetto merchant, has plenty to recommend it, but it is lightweight stuff compared to … [Read more...]