It’s the critic’s dead horse: What’s good cannot be local; what’s local cannot be good. Thankfully, it’s also patently false: What’s kept me most fascinated with our theater community foryikesalmost 20 years now? It’s not some unassailable distance between our standards and those in the regional centers I’ve visited (including Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Connecticut, Louisville, […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
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Rabbit Hole; The Santaland Diaries
Rabbit Hole Manbites Dog Theater, Durham Through Dec. 22 www.manbitesdogtheater.org The playwright’s title winks at us, while the company’s promotional material promises a “bittersweet comedy” to “share with your family this holiday season.” As a result, those expecting the pratfallsor even the redemptive laughterof David Lindsay-Abaire’s previous works are likely to feel they’ve been rabbit-punched […]
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Rabbit Hole is darker and deeper than advertised
Rabbit Hole Manbites Dog Theater Through Dec. 22 We can understand why Rabbit Hole won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama. Much like the Orphean myth alluded to in one of its closing sequences, the play follows a married couple, Becca and Howie, through the emotional underworld of grief, some eight months after the accidental […]
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The Little Prince tells a different story of kings and princes in a desert
The Little Prince Playmakers Rep Through Dec. 16 Did Antoine de Saint-Exupéry somehow get it wrong? Is the essential not always invisible to the eye? The persuasive case is on display at Paul Green Theater through Dec. 16, in Playmakers Rep’s production of The Little Prince. I’ll confess I’m always a bit leery of giving […]
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holding pattern
holding pattern both hands theatre company Manbites Dog Theater Through Nov. 17 A children’s theater piece for adults: It’s clear from the start this is what both hands theater offers in its current staging of Nicole Quenelle’s new play, holding pattern. Actually, make that “before the start” instead, since the first inkling of what’s to […]
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My Lovely Suicides and The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Last week we observed that biography, at its root, involves actively making sense of a subject’s existence; searching for coherence and organizing principles in a lifetime of disparate events and then articulating them. This week, two biographical playsCarson Kreitzer’s 2003 drama The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the world premiere of Jody McAuliffe’s […]
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A Lesson from Aloes; Crimes of the Heart
A Lesson from Aloes Deep Dish Theater Company Through Nov. 10 It’s important to recall that apartheid was widely condemned around the worldbut still very much in placeas Athol Fugard wrote this remembrance of the bad old days in 1980. Set in 1963, Aloes is certainly no warm bath of nostalgia. It depicts, with commendable […]
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Southern female felons in Crimes of the Heart and Rewind
I know why I had such difficulty getting into the fun of things last Saturday night, as dizzy Babe Magrath fought off that inconvenient manslaughter chargejust one of those things you’re going to have to expect when you go around shooting your husband in the stomachin playwright Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, Crimes of the […]
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A Lesson from Aloes
A Lesson from Aloes Deep Dish Theater Company Through Nov. 10 The dry seasonsreal and metaphoricalinvite comparison. There’s the years-long drought that clings to the South Africa of 1963 in Athol Fugard’s play and our present one, an early dividend of global warming. There’s the moment of ebb tide that this work documents in the […]
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Two plays raise questions about how we view the condemned
columbinus 1/2 Raleigh Ensemble Players Through Oct. 27 Coyote on a Fence UNC DDA Mainstage Closed Oct. 16 Though only one of the two plays touches directly upon it, I realized something about the death penalty last weekend, after seeing Raleigh Ensemble Players’ production of columbinus and UNC’s DDA Mainstage’s rendition of Coyote on a […]
