A study by a Stony Brook University professor theorizes that if two people answer 36 probing and personal questions, then stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes, they will fall in love. Perhaps, but that is all playwright Jennifer Lane (Harlowe) had to hear to write a play dramatizing such an unusual exercise. That two-person play, To Fall in Love, receives its … [Read more...]
Young playwright gets world premiere at FAU Theatre Lab
Playwright and novelist Jennifer Lane recalls exactly what the initial motivation was for her to write Harlowe, which is having its world premiere Friday at Florida Atlantic University’s Theater Lab. It was years ago, while she was in Columbia University’s graduate playwriting program. She was falling behind in her work and the program director was growing impatient with … [Read more...]
Theatre Lab’s new director committed to South Florida
Louis Tyrrell, a South Florida champion of new works for the theater, has been an artistic director for almost four decades. First at the Theatre Club of the Palm Beaches, which morphed into Florida Stage, then at the Arts Garage and most recently at Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab, where he currently one of a four-member staff. But Tyrrell has now passed the baton … [Read more...]
With quirky ‘Be Here Now,’ FAU Theatre Lab has a major play
What causes some of us to see joy in the world and others to see pure gloom? And if the difference between the two perspectives were caused by a brain tumor, would you accept a potentially fatal condition for a temporarily rosy outlook? That is the dilemma facing Bari, a former professor of nihilism and avowed cynic, in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s quirky and ultimately … [Read more...]
With ‘Be Here Now,’ playwright Laufer looks for meaning in chance
For 15 years, Deborah Zoe Laufer has been writing plays on such diverse subjects as family dysfunction, the end of the world and medical ethics. More often than not, her scripts stem from something she heard on National Public Radio. Certainly that is the case with Be Here Now, Laufer’s latest thought-provoking comedy, opening at Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab … [Read more...]
Sagal’s ‘Most Wanted’ a triumph at FAU Theatre Lab
Welcome back, Peter Sagal. True, the host of National Public Radio’s current events quiz show, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, has hardly been out of the public eye lately. Wait, wait, make that “out of the public ear.” But when he began the show 20 years ago, he stopped writing plays, and if you want to measure the size of that loss, head to Florida Atlantic University … [Read more...]
Radio’s Sagal returns to playwriting career with ‘Most Wanted’ at FAU
Longtime followers of Florida Stage may recall Peter Sagal, whose plays Denial and What to Say were produced in the 1990s by the now-defunct theater company that specialized in new American works. These days, however, Sagal is more widely known as the host of the popular National Public Radio current events quiz show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. For the past 20 years, Sagal … [Read more...]
FAU Theatre Lab launches New Play Festival this month
Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab ends its second full season – its first with a slate of fully produced plays – with a New Play Festival, May 10-14, in Parliament Hall on FAU’s Boca Raton campus. The festival kicks off with an evening of short plays selected from submissions by participants in the master classes of the Playwrights Forum, led by associate artistic … [Read more...]
‘Motherland,’ at FAU, takes Brechtian look at War on Poverty
Allison Gregory set out to write a play inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, generally considered one of the great stage works of the 20th century. The only thing is she knew almost nothing about it. “I had never read it or seen it. I knew zero about Brecht, really,” concedes Gregory. “I’ve never even seen a Brecht play. I’ve never studied Brecht. … [Read more...]
Quirky, brilliant ‘Random World’ engages at FAU Theatre Lab
“Connect, Georges,” says Dot to a brilliant, but obtuse pointillist painter in the musical Sunday in the Park with George. And in a similar way, theatergoers at Steven Dietz’s wise and witty comedy of missed connections, This Random World, will want to shout to the characters to open their eyes and understand what links them. Dietz’s intricately structured script, now … [Read more...]