One of the great things about the Fringe Festival is the opportunity to see independent companies perform works unlikely to be attempted by more established theater groups. This year brought…
An early version of this show lit up the Live Arts Festival in ’05, and I couldn’t wait to see the latest manifestation of the collaboration between Thaddeus Phillips’ Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental and Wilhelm Bros. music. The production has grown up over the intervening years. It’s bigger, wider, and deeper, and just as amazing and magical.
August Strindberg’s CREDITORS is a revenge tragedy of classic proportions, a modern descendant of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. His unnerving story of a love triangle in late 19th-century Sweden…
RETURN RETURN DEPARTURE considers the fleeting nature of time and the human compulsion to capture it, and there can be few more poignant examples than an ephemeral dance duet at sunset, videotaped for posterity by the performers themselves.
CYMBELINE is one of Shakespeare’s later and lesser-known works, not often performed and hard to classify. Though inspired by legends about an ancient British king named Cunobelinus, it is not…
Some of the best entertainments are plot-heavy pulp mysteries: the film Double Indemnity, Raymond Chandler’s stories, Agatha Christie’s plays. With unemployment, serial killing, prostitution, addiction, and flawed police detectives, George F….
Review of A DYBBUCK from EgoPo Classic Theatre
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival receives hundreds of applications from American drama troupes every year. Philadelphia’s New City Stage Company is in talks to become one of those selected to travel…
In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus compares man’s existence to the figure from Greek mythology, condemned for eternity to push a rock up a mountain, only to have it…
I have a soft spot for the drawing room plays by Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maughan, and the like. With ready wit they provide amusing takedowns of bourgeois society, its conventions…
n HAMLETMACHINE and MEDEAPLAYS, now in seemless production at the space by The Renegade Company, Müller has reassembled classic texts and plot-points into a dislocating new context.
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and…
Author Graham Greene wrote two types of books. His novels (The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American), onto which he staked his literary reputation, and his “entertainments” (Our Man in…
Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy, TITUS ANDRONICUS, is a bloodbath of murder, dismemberment, rape, and cannibalism, which has remained for centuries the Bard’s most maligned work. Some have questioned its authorship,…
“Forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognize” —Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk Attempting to summarize the best modernist short stories is futile; it’s impossible to…
Passenger: It’s madness — what sort of an age do we live in? You don’t feel safe anywhere now, only at home… First Passenger: At home? Passenger: Only at home…
As a lover of theater, beer, and meat-filled pastries, I’ve been excited by the ads and positive buzz about this series from Tiny Dynamite for a few months. When I…
Since 2004, Inis Nua Theatre Company has been entertaining Philadelphia audiences with provocative new Irish and British plays, staged at venues around the city. The company has already marked a…
We’ve all met someone like her: the beautiful ex–prom queen with a cutting wit, overconfidence, and the forgivable tendency to say something hopelessly stupid and insensitive. In Leslye Headland’s BACHELORETTE,…
THE MEEP PROJECT is a charming collaboration between playwright Ed Swidey and Simpatico Theatre Project. The world premiere development piece (which looked as fully developed as any original production I’ve seen!) employs new methods of storytelling, using movement and sound in place of language.
