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Theater

Wit at the Players’ Ring honors life and death

For whom the bell tolls
An array of disciplines have taken on the puzzle of life and death.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 23, 2012

A cautionary tale from 18th-century France

Honoring the masses
Though there's no hard evidence that Marie Antoinette actually uttered "Let them eat cake," she remains a larger-than-life symbol of ruling-class decadence and a culture of gaping wealth disparity.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 16, 2012

Circle Mirror transcends theater

Beyond the wall
"Are we going to do any real acting?" complains the one teenager enrolled in a small Vermont community center's drama class.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 09, 2012

The Originals explore the soul of America

Go West, young woman
"I savor the boundlessness of it all," exalts life-loving Macon (Sally Wood) to timid Bess (Jennifer Porter), under the vertiginously open sky of 1860s Wyoming Territory.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 02, 2012

Acorn performs ten plays by Maine writers

Ups and downs in new works
This year, the ten short plays of Acorn Productions' 11th Annual Maine Playwrights Festival, chosen from more than 50 submitted to this year's open call, tends toward the dark: it includes specters of AIDS, the economic downturn, child abuse, and death by wild animals.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 27, 2012

Freeport Factory gives Holiday her due

Meeting Billie
With its low lighting, cocktail tables, scarlet-draped piano, and old-timey microphone, the scene at Freeport Factory Stage is set as a small club readied for an intimate night of jazz.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 11, 2012

Portland Stage’s comedy about hope and age

Taking their time
In one sense, time is the most plentiful possession of World War I veterans Gustave (Edmond Genest), Henri (Munson Hicks), and Philippe (Philip Goodwin), who live together in a military retirement home in the French countryside.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 04, 2012

Ibsen's Ghosts haunt all of SPACE

Seething spirits
Myriad Portland spirits have conspired in raising the much-anticipated new production of Lorem Ipsum, an elegant, bewitchingly multi-medial staging of and around Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 28, 2012

Mad Horse's cutting choice of Zindel's Gamma Rays

Half-lives
When a group of tender seeds are exposed to toxic radiation, the ones receiving the smallest dose develop normally; those that are moderately exposed mutate into larger-than-life oddities, and the ones getting the heaviest dose wither and die.

By: JEFF INGLIS | March 21, 2012

Good Theater goes big

With Neil Simon's Little Me
Of all the tenets in the American mythology, upward mobility is one of the biggies, both the most exalted and the most critiqued: We have both our Pretty Women and our Sisters Carrie.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 14, 2012

Dramatic Rep gets Nervous, dark

Cracking a Smile
The parents of children with severe disabilities have an almost incalculably different experience than other parents.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 15, 2012

Portland Stage resurrects four of Tennessee’s other works

Williams at 100
A young boy walks the railroad tracks with a delusional girl who lives alone in an old house.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 07, 2012

Homer’s epic, in puppets

Stringed instruments
Our story thus far: The war is over! No, not the Iraq War, but one of even more mythological origins: After ten years of battle against Troy, the victorious war hero Odysseus, whose distinctively phallic sword arm has a life of its own, is poised to finally lead his troops back home to Ithaca.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 07, 2012

Acorn’s must-see production of a Pinter classic

Turning up the heat
Almost everything goes unsaid in Harold Pinter's 1958 classic, The Birthday Party .

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 29, 2012

Young actors take to the stage in Wiley and the Hairy Man

Finding courage
Deep in the Appalachian swamp, young Wiley (Luke Stickney, winningly) lives among tree toads, alligators, and plenty of magical spirits.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 22, 2012

Williams’s shattering Menagerie in Freeport

Fragile suffering
Tom's restlessness at home in St. Louis, where he's stuck providing for his plaintive mom and crippled sister, becomes particularly oppressive in the very architecture of the Freeport Factory Stage.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 22, 2012

Portland Stage goes noir

Adaptive ensemble
Dead guys, mysterious dames, mobsters, dirty cops, and a handsome array of handguns are all in a night's work for Philip Marlowe, novelist Raymond Chandler's quintessential LA private eye.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 15, 2012

Mad Horse’s Becky Shaw peers behind the love curtain

The one who knew too much
Three months after her father's death, the two people closest to thirty-something Suzanna (Elizabeth Chambers) don't have a lot of patience for her grief, which has her reduced to a weeping mess watching bad TV under a blanket.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 08, 2012

Good Theater wrestles with love and sin

Heartplay
There's only one major problem in the love between Adam (Rob Cameron), a sarcastic would-be teacher working in retail, and Luke (Joe Bearor), an aspiring young actor.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 01, 2012

Public Theater tries to save disappearing communication

Watch your tongue
George (James Hoban) has a knack for languages: He's a polyglot, can lovingly conjugate all tenses of even Esperanto, and has dedicated his life to preserving tongues on the brink of extinction.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | February 01, 2012