Author: Colin Douglas
The Incessant Dirt and Dust
Fen
When the audience enters the beautiful Court Theatre they will behold a startling sight. Collette Pollard’s naturalistic scenic and projection design for this production of Caryl Churchill’s play is a vast, terraced expanse covered with dry soil and pocked with a few dying plants and rocks. This wasteland is a metaphor that visually represents the parched, hopeless lives of the characters we’re about to meet in the land they call home. The darkness is occasionally broken as the shadows part through Keith Parham’s eerie, moody lighting; and Jeffrey Levin’s magnificent sound design hovers over the production like a wings of a giant predatory bird. The atmosphere is complete for this ghostly story.
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Filling the Silence With Poetry and Passion
Anna in the Tropics
On a steamy Summer day in Tampa, Florida, three women wait anxiously at the docks, searching for a ship to arrive. This vessel will carry Juan Julian to them, their handsome, new, much-anticipated lector. He will replace the previous lector, who died several weeks ago. The lector’s job is to read novels aloud to the employees of this small, family-owned Cuban cigar manufacturing company, while they work. Juan’s mellifluous voice will transport the immigrant laborers, who are mostly female, to a far more interesting and romantic world than their own. Reading from his books fills the silence with poetry and passion, and alleviates the monotony of the hand-rolling, sorting and packaging cigars. As some of the workers push for modernization and change, it soon becomes clear that not everyone at the factory likes having the lector around.
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Black Lives Matter
Boulevard of Bold Dreams
The evening of February 29, 1940 heralded the beginning of a new era in filmmaking. History was about to be made as Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actor to win the coveted Academy Award for her supporting role in the blockbuster motion picture, “Gone With the Wind.” But, in the playwright’s compelling fictional portrayal of this monumental evening, there are at least three Black Americans at Hollywood’s Ambassador Hotel who are harboring a pocketful of wishes and and lifelong aspirations.
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Once Upon a Time
Into the Woods
Just imagine, if you will, that Once Upon a Time the characters from your favorite childhood fairy tales all lived in the same neighborhood? Suddenly those familiar stories would begin to blend together as Cinderella, her Stepmother and Stepsisters, Little Red Ridinghood, Jack (of the Beanstalk fame), his Mother and their cow, Rapunzel and and the Witch, and other familiar characters, all interact in order to survive their everyday magical existence. Like us, every character has a wish, and those yearnings affect everyone around them. They all learn that they must journey into the forest, around tall trees, down shadowy paths, into deep ravines and back up into the sunlight in order to achieve what they want. But once upon a time there’ll be sacrifices and losses, both of love and of loved ones.
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Please God, I Need This Job
A Chorus Line
What makes a multi award-winning 1975 musical about dancers auditioning for a role in the chorus so popular and timely in 2023? Well, the show is historically important, having run for an awe-inspiring 15 years on Broadway, sparking umpteen national and international productions, tours, films and books, plus receiving the Tony, Olivier, Drama Desk Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. But more importantly, the musical has become a metaphor for every single person with a dream, as well as for anybody simply looking for work. “I really need this job. Please God, I need this job. I’ve got to get this job!” as sung by the entire cast during the opening number, embodies the very heart and soul of the piece. Amid our current dismal economic climate the same mantra can be heard repeated by millions of out-of-work Americans today.
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Be the Hero of Your Own Story
Big Fish
Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre’s first production of 2023 has a lot more heart and soul than many of their flashier, more feelgood features of previous seasons. There’s certainly comic moments, and a whimsical, magical feel to the musical. But the story deals with a serious subject. It’s about the strained relationship between Edward and his son Will Bloom. When the musical opens young Will is about to wed his beloved fiancee, Josephine. We also discover that his father, Edward Bloom, has kept secret that he’s been seriously ill for a while and that his days may be coming to an end.
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Toni Stone
Keeping Your Eye on the Ball
Have You ever heard of Toni Stone? Don’t feel too bad because even award-winning playwright Lydia R. Diamond knew little to nothing about this important African-American woman. It wasn’t until Ms. Diamond read Martha Ackmann’s biography entitled Curveball, The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone that she learned about this important Black female athlete. The book inspired the playwright to tell Toni’s story for the stage. So who was Toni Stone? Until this spunky, talented athlete entered the scene, baseball was completely a male-dominated sport. But Toni Stone changed that. She’s remembered as the first African-American woman—as well as the very first woman, ever—to play professional baseball in the Negro leagues. But getting someone to hire her took determination on Ms. Stone’s part. Talk about keeping your eye on the ball!
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Politics is So Abstract
Andy Warhol in Iran
Holed up in his air-conditioned room in the Tehran Hilton, American pop artist, Andy Warhol, decides to escape the intense summer heat while on a 1976 trip to Iran. He’s come to this country to take Polaroid photographs of Empress Farah Pahlavi, the wife of the Shah, to use when painting her portrait. She’s commissioned Warhol to paint her likeness, like many other celebrities and political figures before her. His past pop art portraits had included such diverse names as Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao and, his most famous subject, Marilyn Monroe. This part of the play is based on true events, but what happens next is fiction.
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Sixty percent Water
the ripple, the wave that carried me home
Told both in the “present,” actually in 1992, and the “past,” 1960’s Kansas, Janice plays a dual role. She’s simultaneously the narrator of her story and the principle character, seamlessly sliding back and forth throughout the memories of her childhood and adolescence. The story Janice tells always revolves around water. She begins by confessing how, to this very day, she keeps a glass of water beside her bed to drink upon waking up in the morning. Janice hates the taste of water but she also realizes that it’s a necessity of life since, as she reminds us, our bodies are sixty percent water. And, as a child and teenager, she remembers how water was always at least sixty percent of her parents’ lives.
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Is It Nice?
The Birthday Party
At the top of the play, a reticent, middle-age man named Petey ambles into his house and sits down at the table, buried in his newspaper. From the kitchen serving window, his wife Meg calls out to whoever just entered, “Is that you, Petey?” At first he doesn’t respond; then, finally, he confirms that, yes, he’s back from work. She brings him his breakfast which is cornflakes, continually asking, “Is it nice?” He finally answers her. Then Meg brings in a surprise entree: fried bread. Again she asks, “Is it nice?” Her constant, repetitive questions are probably the same exchange of small talk that’s taken place every single morning of their married lives. But the broken record of questions evokes laughter, especially as delivered by the two talented, beautifully directed actors in this production. However, this ambivalent opening scene also sets the tone for the rest of this three-act play.
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