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MEGAN GRUMBLING
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Hamlet's salad days
Much has been made of Prince Hamlet's exhausting philosophical indecision. To be or not? To kill or not? He has a hell of a time figuring it out, when he should be happily ensconced in college life back in Wittenberg.
Homegrown dozen
It's time once again for Acorn Productions' annual celebration of the playwrights living among us.
Fins to the left, fins to the right
Life is in upheaval for these four friends, and all of them will need to go deep to make sense of things in Swimming in the Shallows , a comedy with a touch of the surreal, by Adam Bock.
Shifting time and gender
Insights into both the masculine and the feminine are at the center of Virginia Woolf's Orlando , a fabulist commentary on the fluidity of gender and sexual identity.
Speaking out of silence
Women's experience of slavery, genocide, and cultural oppression, says playwright Carolyn Gage, is very different than men's: Sexual violence and women's ability to give birth makes them subject to a particularly penetrating form of colonization. And even the best-intentioned histories, she adds, often try to "disappear" that difference.
In all the right vignettes of Cariani’s new play
A man and a woman in a Walmart-type store are driven into each other's arms by their Obsessive Impulsive disorder. A man has a condition that keeps him from hearing the words "I love you" from his new lover. A woman with a wife and young child searches desperately through the garage for something she's lost — herself.
Quite a pair
The autobiographical two-man show they co-wrote and performed, A Couple of Blaguards, is onstage now starring the marvelous Paul Haley and Tony Reilly
Finding happiness amid violence
Snowlion exclusively produces works with "cultural, ethical, and spiritual value," and found both complexity and life-affirmation in Vincent Sessa's A Child's Guide to Innocence .
Distance in time
It's been a rough journey that brought 21-year-old Leo (Erik Moody), on a bicycle, all the way from Washington state to the Manhattan apartment of his grandma Vera (Alma Cuervo).
Just-so stories
The name of Noël Coward is fairly synonymous with the biting, devastating verbal wit of his farces like Blithe Spirit , in which well-off Brits behave badly, having at each other with verbal razors.
Lyric doesn’t take these tales lying down
Fairy tales seem to have an enduring appeal — especially when they're tweaked to look just a little bit less rarified.
Test flights
It's an on-stage-off-stage winter in Portland Stage Company's Studio Theater.
Make my satire a double
Theatergoers who have been hankering for a shot of satire are in luck this week: The University of Southern Maine is serving up the biting spirits of playwright Edward Albee, and they're making it a double, with his one-act plays The Zoo Story and The American Dream.
A theatrical mash-up
Someone doctors the Scotch early on, but it's brandy that playwright Edward Bennett (Rob Cameron) and his actress wife Sorel (Abigail Killeen) start in on first in Death by Design, by Rob Urbinati.
Great fare for groundlings
A certain kind of farce distinguishes itself among theatrical forms much as pigs distinguish themselves among the farm animals: by its fondness for playing in the mud, by its grinning, no-nonsense intelligence, and by the tasty saltiness with which it is often served.
Caging the tiger
Not too long into Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, most of the characters pacing the stage are either dead, near death, or intimate enough with it to see ghosts.
Finding the medium
The most sympathetic character in Noel Coward's snarky little farce, Blithe Spirit, is neither the "astral bigamist" Charles Condomine nor the petulant ghost of his first wife Elvira, nor even his beleaguered current wife Ruth.
Warming up winter
Quite a few evolutions have taken shape over the last year at SPACE Gallery, including the opening of the Annex and the redesign of the main gallery, which just turned ten years old.
Places, everyone!
Both big performance festivals of 2012 promise to be even bigger in 2013: PORTFRINGE runs June 24-30 at four performing spaces, with another open call and even more performance slots available.
A year in footlights
The past year in Portland theater saw a gain, a loss, and a move: First, summer brought us the first annual PortFringe festival and the inaugural Portland Performing Arts Festival.
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