by Barbara Waldinger Imagine a play about the poetry of William Blake, one of the most complex writers ever known, written in rhymed couplets (like Blake’s poems), featuring a pair of actors portraying university professors who have been lecturing on this poet for the past fifteen years. Bridge Street Theatre,…
by Barbara Waldinger The title explains it all.  Rachel Lynett has written a powerful and controversial attack against white liberals who think they understand Black people but whose marches and protests against racism accomplish nothing beyond making themselves feel better. For a white reviewer like myself to evaluate this work…
by Barbara Waldinger South Africa is the ONLY African country where gay marriage is legal. At the same time, the common South African practice of “corrective rape,”—purportedly intended to turn lesbians straight—goes unprosecuted. This is the background of the taut and powerful drama, Dangerous House by Jen Silverman, the fourth…
by Barbara Waldinger A middle-aged Englishwoman, identified only as Homebody, tries in vain to remember the name of her anti-depressant: “a portmanteau chemical cocktail word confected by punning psychopharmacologists.” She imagines her “brain floating in a salt bath, frosted with a rime of salt, a pickle-brine brain, pink-beige walnut-wrinkled nutmeat…
by Barbara Waldinger Wilted spinach salad with warm bacon dressing; seared wild salmon with a Bengali onion chutney; seared asparagus with olive oil, salt and pepper; gnocchi, pork belly sliders, scallops. . . This is not a restaurant menu but rather a gustatory appreciation of Theresa Rebeck’s Seared at Williamstown…
by Barbara Waldinger In a recent interview with the Times Union, Nicole Ricciardi, director of Shakespeare & Company’s current production of Creditors, describes the play as “one ninety-minute song.” Despite the fact that there is no music, Ricciardi and her consummate cast devote themselves to “following the rhythm” in Strindberg’s…
by Barbara Waldinger How is it possible for a local theatre, performing in a school with a cast of seventeen, including a small group of experienced actors working alongside a number of young students, to mount a credible, fully-staged and costumed production of Shakespeare’s Richard II, a play written entirely…
by Barbara Waldinger Henrik Ibsen is a tough act to follow. At the end of his 1879 masterpiece, A Doll’s House, audiences gasped as Nora Helmer left her husband and three children, delivering what George Bernard Shaw famously called “the door slam heard around the world,” presumably never to return.…
