A Trailer Park Christmas Common Ground Theatre Through Dec. 21 Our host had just walked over carrying a tray filled with strange-looking hors d’oeuvres. Well, it was the holiday season, after all, and it would have been impolite to refuse. So I lifted the unlikely canapéa single Dorito, upgraded by a generous thread of pungent, […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
A Christmas Carol and Act a Lady
A Christmas Carol Theatre in the Park @ Durham Performing Arts Center, Dec. 5-7 @ Memorial Auditorium, Progress Energy Center, through Dec. 17 For years now, the character of the Lamplighter has opened the Theatre in the Park production of A Christmas Carol with the following, somewhat disingenuous words: “My, I wasn’t expecting such a […]
Posted inArt
A new tour of Chicago arrives in Raleigh
Chicago Broadway Series South @ Memorial Auditorium, Progress Energy Center Through Dec. 7 As opening lines go, it’s a beaut. Let’s all say it together, shall we? “Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to see a story of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treacheryall those things we hold near and dear to our […]
Posted inArt
David Dorfman challenges racialism in Disavowal
Disavowal David Dorfman Dance Reynolds Theater Nov. 13-14 Critical assessments of 19th-century abolitionist John Brown differ radically in their conclusions: Documentarian Ken Chowder calls him the father of American terrorism; biographer David Reynolds’ book credits Brown in its subtitle as “the man who killed slavery.” But in choreographer David Dorfman’s latest work, Disavowal, the firebrand […]
Posted inTheater
European culture in Hysteria; N.C. history in Blood
Hysteria Burning Coal Theatre Through Nov. 23 It’s a point most have forgotten at this pointif they ever knew it to begin with. But when Guillaume Apollinaire originally attached the French prefix sur to the word real to first coin the term surrealism, the neologism first meant “above the real” or “super-real”; not, in short, […]
Posted inArt
African-American identity crisis in PlayMakers’ Blue Door; a revival of Brecht’s antiwar Mother Courage
Blue Door @ PlayMakers Rep Through Nov. 9 It’s understandable enough if something seems more than vaguely familiar in the structure of Tanya Barfield’s play Blue Door: Three spirits, all vying to change the soul of a hard-hearted man for the better in the course of one night? Charles Dickens, call your office. Actually, the […]
Posted inMusic
Live: Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson has long been one of my favorite artists. Her unique brand of performance artthe genre the artist claims for herselfcould be called postmodern storytelling: a mix of spoken word, the electronically altered human voice, and ambient or pop music grooves mixed in with the occasional odd lyric and visual projection. Gradually, Anderson has […]
Posted inArt
Burning Coal’s premiere of David Edgar’s geopolitical drama
The Prisoner’s Dilemma Burning Coal Theater Company Through Sept. 28 “I hope you now understand two things,” a polite, nearly diffident playwright David Edgar said to the audience of The Prisoner’s Dilemma just after the end of its opening night performance last Thursday. “When big and rich countries, even with the best of possible motives, […]
Posted inArt
A stirring take on Athol Fugard; a lively cover of Eric Bogosian
The Island Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern @ Manbites Dog Theater Through Sept. 13 It’s an irony fit to choke on: A sadistic, day-long punishment designed to turn man against man hasn’t broken the friendship between Winston and John, political prisoners and cellmates on South Africa’s notorious Robben Island. But the unexpected good news one […]
Posted inArt
A Raleigh revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! reaches for a bygone era
Awake and Sing! 2nd Avenue South Players, Meymandi Theater of the Murphey School www.rcjf.org Through Aug. 31 A painter’s studio has a certain drama all its own, even when no one is in the room: You sense the potential in the place. The drama intensifies when you see a work on an easel, partially completed. […]
