With COVID safely in the rear mirror and audiences back attending theater, the 2023-2024 South Florida season looks quite promising, with full schedules, numerous world premieres and several companies celebrating significant anniversaries. Here’s how the theater scene is shaping up, moving geographically from north to south. With its playhouse expanded, the Maltz … [Read more...]
Dramaworks takes ‘natural’ step, hires in-house playwright
At a time when many regional theaters are decreasing their staffs because of COVID, the economy and shrinking attendance, Palm Beach Dramaworks has a new hire. Producing artistic director William Hayes has announced the addition of the company’s first resident playwright, Jenny Connell Davis, whose Holocaust-themed drama The Messenger will have its world premiere at the … [Read more...]
Challenging two-hander ‘Topdog/Underdog’ packs punch at Dramaworks
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has more important things on her mind, but one takeaway from her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, Topdog/Underdog, is surely to be careful when you name your children. For their father, as a perverse joke, named his two African-American sons Lincoln and Booth. As a result, they have been pitted against each other throughout their lives and … [Read more...]
No weak links in powerful ‘Osage County’ at Dramaworks
How fortunate for playwright Tracy Letts that he grew up in a bitter, vindictive and addiction-prone household. For his relatives became the inspiration for the Westons of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning August: Osage County, a darkly dramatic and often quite funny look at his wildly dysfunctional family. The three-and-a-half-hour, … [Read more...]
Dramaworks explores dysfunctional family in ‘August: Osage County’
Often compared to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is an exploration of yet another dysfunctional family, an epic play that also was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It premiered in 2007 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where Letts is a company member and resident playwright. It quickly transferred to Broadway, … [Read more...]
‘The Science of Leaving Omaha’: Downward mobility on the prairie
It is one thing to recognize the dramatic potential in a New York Times article about the disintegration of working-class communities and its devastating toll from one generation to the next, as playwright Carter W. Lewis did. It is quite another thing to make the imaginative leap and turn that material into The Science of Leaving Omaha, about a teenage dropout working in a … [Read more...]
Dramaworks reaffirms relevance of ’12 Angry Men’ in searing production
By Sharon Geltner “One man is dead. The life of another is at stake. I urge you to deliberate honestly and thoughtfully. If there is a reasonable doubt --- then you must bring me a verdict of ‘not guilty.‘” The judge’s instructions open Twelve Angry Men, the classic American drama by Reginald Rose, set in a dingy conference room in 1954. The Palm Beach Dramaworks … [Read more...]
Stellar main characters stand out in Dramaworks’s ‘4000 Miles’
She frequently stumbles when reaching for the right word in conversation, and don’t bother trying to talk to her when she doesn’t have her hearing aid in. Still, for a 91-year-old, Vera Joseph is a remarkable woman. Based on playwright Amy Herzog’s own grandmother, she is the central character of 4000 Miles, an acclaimed off-Broadway work and Pulitzer Prize finalist from 15 … [Read more...]
It’s all about family: ‘4000 Miles’ opens Dramaworks season
Talk about an odd couple. Consider 21-year-old Leo, nearing the end of a cross-country bicycle trip, concluding in New York’s Greenwich Village, where his 91-year-old grandmother, Vera, lives. Arriving unannounced and unexpected at her apartment in the middle of the night, Leo embarks on a journey of discovery with a relative he hardly knows, an emotional trek at least … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2022-23: The season in theater
Now that the COVID 19 pandemic is in the rearview mirror --- we hope --- South Florida’s theaters are looking ahead to their first full season of productions in several years. So below is a look at what is scheduled, taken in geographic order from north to south, from Jupiter to Coral Gables. Last season, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was hit with a double whammy of COVID … [Read more...]