by Macey Levin When the audience meanders in to see Golden Leaf Ragtime Blues by Charles Smith at Shakespeare and Company’s Bernstein Theatre they are entertained by recordings of old comedy sketches including “Who’s on First.” The stage is surrounded by a red gauze curtain offering a glimpse of a…
by Macey Levin An isolated lighthouse sets the scene for Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs at Shakespeare & Company’s Tina Packer Playhouse in Lenox, Massachusetts. James Warwick has directed a quirky and provocative production of one of the classics of The Theatre of the Absurd. The plays of Jean Genet, Samuel…
by Barbara Waldinger Shakespeare & Company’s production of The Chairs has shaved off Ionesco’s sharp edges, anything unpleasant or uncomfortable, focusing instead on the relationship between an Old Man (Malcolm Ingram) and Old Woman (Barbara Sims) who have been married for seventy-five years. The Old Woman begs her husband…
by Barbara Waldinger “I live off the suffering of strangers. I build a career on the sorrows of people I don’t know and will never see again. . . I’m such a fraud.” These concerns are expressed by international photojournalist Sarah Goodman in a revealing moment as she recuperates from…
by Roseann Cane In 1927 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg posited what is often referred to as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: it is not possible to measure simultaneously the position and the velocity of an object, even in theory. Playwright Simon Stephens has said that this quantum theory seems to…
