By Dale King The House of Blue Leaves, the darkly seriocomic John Guare play, is appropriately apt as the finale for Palm Beach Dramaworks’ 19th season. The show that packed the West Palm Beach venue on opening weekend homes in on characters who desperately want their hopes and dreams to work. But a realistic assessment says they probably won’t happen. The Obie … [Read more...]
Nora’s back: Ibsen revisited, at the Maltz
In 1879, when feminist Nora Helmer – the main character in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House – slammed the front door and walked out on her husband and family, it is generally agreed that she opened another door, to the start of modern drama. Ibsen’s play ended there, but what happened to Nora afterwards, as she tried to forge a life as a single woman in a Norwegian society … [Read more...]
‘Indecent’ opens Dramaworks season in powerful style
“Indecent” is both the title of Paula Vogel’s impressionistic chronicle of a 1907 melodrama by novice playwright Sholem Asch, as well as the critical and legal opinion of the work once it arrived on Broadway in the early 1920s. While Vogel’s play serves as a production history of Asch’s God of Vengeance, it is also much more – a portrait of survival of a piece of … [Read more...]
Dramaworks closes out season with Shaffer’s powerful ‘Equus’
Peter Shaffer’s 1973 stylized drama Equus takes the form of a detective story, as child psychiatrist Martin Dysart tries to learn what caused 17-year-old Alan Strang to brutally blind a group of horses. With heightened theatricality, it becomes not a whodunnit, but a whydunnit. And in the course of trying to understand the boy’s motives, Dr. Dysart wrestles with his own … [Read more...]
Dramaworks’s ‘Little Foxes’ a showcase for powerful performances
Is it just me or do most plays produced these days – even those written long ago – seem to echo our current political situation? Neither the family in uneasy economic straits in The Humans nor the tale of a business bully who goes to Washington in Born Yesterday actually mention Donald Trump by name, but it is hard to watch either and not think of The Orange One. The same … [Read more...]
Powerful acting brings quirky souls of ‘Inishmaan’ to vivid life
On the tiny, isolated island of Inishmaan, off the western coast of Ireland, either there is something peculiar in the water or the residents are genetically predisposed to quirkiness. Either way, few ever escape from their homeland. But at least Billy Claven, the so-called Cripple of Inishmaan, a 17-year-old orphan with a body mangled since birth, can dream of leaving his … [Read more...]
‘Arcadia’ a feast of intellectual riches at Dramaworks
Far too many evenings of theater leave one hungry for mental nourishment. Then there are the plays of Tom Stoppard, who challenges the brain with heady subject matter and tickles the funny bone with audacious wordplay. Introduced to the world in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his deconstruction of Hamlet by way of Waiting for Godot, Stoppard was long … [Read more...]
Stoppard’s ‘Arcadia’ may be Dramaworks’s biggest challenge
Palm Beach Dramaworks audiences have had to grapple with the weighty plays of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and such absurdists as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. But with its first foray into the canon of Great Britain’s Tom Stoppard, producing his Olivier Award-winning Arcadia, as dense with ideas as it is with wordplay, the company may be serving up its most … [Read more...]
Searing ‘Disgraced’ a triumph at the Maltz
Programming a not-for-profit regional theater is a balancing act between challenging material and work that is escapist entertainment, with many a company erring on the side of the latter. And yet last year – with the exception of plays by William Shakespeare – the most produced script in America was Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, his 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that holds a … [Read more...]