In his heyday, Neil Simon would write a new play each season. In 1985, however, when he didn’t have a good idea for a play, he rewrote one of his finest, funniest comedies, The Odd Couple, changing the gender of the characters and tinkering with many of his previously well-crafted laugh lines. While he never asked me for my opinion, I would have advised him with that … [Read more...]
‘The Thin Place,’ at Boca Stage, is more puzzling than creepy
Unlike horror movies, which want to scare the bejesus out of us, Lucas Hnath’s cerebral ghost story The Thin Place merely wants to creep us out and perhaps have us think about the possibility of an afterlife. Whether or not you are persuaded by this curiously structured play, which demands several leaps of faith by its audience and ultimately ends on theatrical gimmickry, … [Read more...]
Words matter, and are the matter, in Boca Stage two-hander ‘The Sound Inside’
It is no accident that Bella Baird, the central figure in Adam Rapp’s compelling, though arch, play The Sound Inside, is a professor of creative writing at Yale University. For Rapp, himself a former novelist, needed a character obsessed with literature, meticulous with words, someone whose self-conscious dialogue sounds carefully composed, as if written down before it is … [Read more...]
‘Luna Gale’ at Boca Stage tackles big issues, underwhelmingly
Following closely upon its satire of Big Pharma, Rx, Boca Stage now takes a jaundiced look at the bureaucracy of the social safety net in Rebecca Gilman’s Luna Gale. At the play’s center is a stressed-out, overburdened Cedar Rapids social worker named Caroline, whose caseload includes meth addicts Karlie and Peter, parents of the title baby. We first encounter them in an ER … [Read more...]
‘Rx’: Boca Stage’s gentle skewering of Big Pharma delivered with dispatch
Workplace depression is not an officially recognized medical condition, but that does not stop Schmidt Pharma from trying to develop a lucrative cure for what ails so many of us. That includes Meena Pierotti, managing editor of American Cattle and Swine magazine, a trade publication so dreary that depression seems the logical response to employment there. Meena is the … [Read more...]
Show about Marilyn’s last days is, indeed, unremarkable
What is there left to be said about Marilyn Monroe? Almost 60 years after her death from a drug overdose at the age of 36, the Hollywood sex goddess still is a subject of fascination for us. Particularly for those who were alive while she was, which happens to also be the primary audience of Boca Stage. So one can understand why the company chose to produce … [Read more...]
Area’s theater directors vow to focus on diversity
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...]
Lead performances lift iffy ‘Funny Thing’ at Primal Forces
When you grow up the daughter of cartoonist-playwright Jules Feiffer, the purveyor of comic urban neuroses, some of that has to rub off on you. So it has for Halley Feiffer, who juggled humor and anger in I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard (seen two seasons back at GableStage) and, to a lesser extent in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at … [Read more...]
‘Andy and the Orphans’ deals thoughtfully with Down challenges
If the term “orphans” conjures up those adorable tykes from the musical Annie, playwright Lindsey Ferrentino asks us to adjust our sights and consider the more common situation of adults whose parents have died, leaving them with clean-up chores, both physical and emotional. That is how it is in Ferrentino’s Andy and the Orphans for siblings Maggie (Patti Gardner) and … [Read more...]
Snedeker gives master class in acting with chilling ‘Blonde Poison’
There are six million stories in the Holocaust, but few as vivid and complex as that of Stella Kubler Goldschlag, the so-called Blonde Poison. That is also the title of Gail Louw’s one-person performance piece currently receiving its area premiere at Primal Forces. From her Berlin apartment in the 1990s, where Stella is preparing to be interviewed by a German-born, … [Read more...]