Byron Woods

At first it seemed the Independent had leased out the lobby of Manbites Dog Theater for its office relocation last week. The theater’s cozy front room was a maze of cardboard U-Haul boxes, stacked nearly floor to ceiling. But the big difference between the packages I’d glimpsed on Hillsborough Road and these was in the […]

Some people keep dream diaries. Myself, I keep theater and dance reviews. They have more in common than you might at first think. Each attempts to record and interpret evanescencedecidedly short-lived, never-to-be-exactly-repeated phenomena. Each carefully analyzes improbable (and, more than occasionally, bewildering) signals for the presence of meaning. And despiteor, perhaps, because oftheir best efforts, […]

There’s an uneasy early momentthe first of several, as it turns outin Blowfish, playwright Carl Thiessen’s deceptive one-man-show-that-really-isn’t. It’s obvious why I’ll have to tell you about it: Raleigh Ensemble Players’ abbreviated five-night run of the show, in a gallery of Cary’s Page-Walker House that couldn’t have held 50 patrons, surely robbed hundreds of regional […]

There are MacGuffins–and then there are MacGuffins. The term was coined by auteur director Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s to refer to a somewhat deceptive–but expedient–plot device in film, but quickly it was realized that its equivalents are easily found in fiction and on stage. Though a MacGuffin seems at first to be the central […]

A late dispatch, from the theater of the (unintentionally) absurd: Say that a group of survivors who have witnessed, firsthand, the consequences of globalization and ethnic strife upon the rural regions of a distant country have been gathered together and flown, at great expense, to our land. A magnificent hall is rented so they may […]

Once more it is the week of certain magic. Potent words, when spoken well, will have the power to conjure men and women from thin air; to merge two times and places into one; to animate and draw the long dead near so we may hear and love and dance with them again. Halloween? Well, […]

Suppose, for just a moment, that you had to fill three plays into three slots at the start of a theater season. The first one’s your big season opener: a four-week run with big publicity in a 500-seat mainstage; a show that will set the tone for a new year for a theater company in […]

Works age strangely in the theater. In the age of protease inhibitors, a script as recent as Lonely Planet, Steven Dietz’ memory play about AIDS from 1993, can seem dated. Meanwhile, Euripides’ The Trojan Women still speaks tragically, in the very present tense, to the status of women and the spoils of warall the way […]