With British playwright David Hare, we are rarely far removed from political debate. But with his justifiably acclaimed 1995 play Skylight, the political merges deftly with the personal, a head trip grafted onto an emotional tug-of-war, as two former lovers attempt to rekindle what they once had together from the ashes of an affair gone cold. Tom and Kyra are a study in … [Read more...]
Hare’s ‘Skylight’: When politics polarizes passion
David Hare, one of Great Britain’s most acclaimed playwrights, is known for juggling the personal and the political in his works. That balancing act is particularly evident in his 1995 drama Skylight, a reunion of two former lovers from opposite sides of the political spectrum, being revived by Palm Beach Dramaworks beginning Friday. Although set in the days … [Read more...]
Maltz’s new ‘Dracula’ successfully Stokers the fires of silliness
To paraphrase that renowned philosopher Monty Python, “And now for something completely silly.” To open its 2019-20 season, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre has commissioned a new spoofy take on Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale, Dracula. Or more accurately, on the general idea of Dracula, since co-adaptors Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen gleefully concede that they never read … [Read more...]
Dramaworks’s ‘Equus’ packs powerful punch
From a small newspaper item about a teenage boy who inexplicably blinded a stable of horses, playwright Peter Shaffer spun a tale of psychology and mythology, of passion and pain, a detective story that seeks the teen’s motives but becomes just as interested in the demons plaguing the doctor who tries to wean him to normalcy. The play is Equus – the Latin word for … [Read more...]
Weekend picks: May 19-20
Film: While The Avengers and Deadpool 2 duke it out for the box office booty, see instead a small, human unconventional love story with no superheroes. It is called Anything – OK, a terrible, generic title – but it concerns a recent widower in Mississippi (John Carroll Lynch) who moves to Los Angeles at the urging of his meddlesome sister (Maura Tierney), and settles in tawdry … [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...]
‘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...]