Tagged: theater

The Bard’s Town Theatre broadens its focus this season with an outstanding production of Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise.” This tightly-wound family drama about a disgraced evangelical who takes a job at an Idaho Hobby Lobby won an Obie Award in 2011 and has enjoyed a number of exciting regional premieres over the last season by companies like Washington, D.C.’s Wooly Mammoth Theatre and Chicago’s LiveWire.

Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is one of the original romantic comedies, full of tropes you don’t have to be a Bard scholar to recognize: the bickering twosome who fight their mutual attraction until finally succumbing to each other’s unlikely charms, the tragic misunderstanding that derails a happy engagement, meddling relatives, scheming frenemies.

The Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Cumberland has produced original plays about prescription drug abuse, life in the coal mines and how young people decide to stay or leave Harlan County after graduation. The program compiles oral histories and interviews with Harlan County residents and turns them into plays about the present and future of Eastern Kentucky.

A dark secret haunts a rural Illinois farmhouse where a once-proud family molders in disgrace in Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Buried Child.” The play is sometimes described as a dark comedy, and its humor does serve to occasionally diffuse the almost stifling tension that pervades the play. But ultimately, “Buried Child” is a disorienting tragedy about the dissolution of the American family and the legacy of shame that causes one household to unravel and curl violently inward.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. 2,500 years after Aristophanes first suggested women could end a war by kicking powerful husbands out of their beds in “Lysistrata,” the idea is still compelling to playwrights and politicians alike (a Michigan state representative recently suggested a similar strategy).